20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet
by Mariagoner
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how strange the surrounding circumstances would be around her. 20 different looks into Jo and Laurie's marriage. Warning for sexual content.
1. The First Dance

Good lord, I can even now hear my generous readers cry. What is this wittering mad woman doing starting another series for the Little Women fandom when she's got two already, one (A Night to Remember) nearing completion? Well, it's pretty much summer for me, which means that I've finally got time on my side to write and write as much as I please. And since I dearly love Jo/Laurie and am rather put-out when people argue that they'd be disastrous in a marriage together because they argue a lot (because marriages must be completely frictionless to be considered decent?), I wanted to start a new series of drabbles and short stories to write about how Jo and Laurie's married life could have gone on, adventures, arguments, child-births, and creative differences included.

There's not too much married!J/L fic out there (although the excellent Rese has some great pieces-- I especially love her 'Fumbling in their Passion') so I thought it would be nice to trace how their life together could have gone from beginning to very end. And although I have twenty snippets planned out, only about 15 of the snippets have definite plans. If you have any ideas for what could be included in this fic, please let me know about them! I could really use the help.

(Incidentally, I also wrote Chapter 7 of the round-robin fic Rigmarole, beta'd/created by the amazing Black Magic Woman. If you're interested in seeing Jo and Laurie come to an understanding about marriage without having either of their hearts broken completely, you might want to check it out. )

So without further ado... let's get to the story already. This has been a very weighty introduction to a tiny beginning fic!

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**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 1/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: K+, Later R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstance. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**

* * *

**1. **

The first time he dreams of her, he dreams of them dancing like mad men, her right paw propped against his shoulder while her left had been steady in his hand. She is the most brilliant girl he has ever met so far, some strange nymph who had managed to surprise him with warm cries and low laughter, with flakes of feather in her messy dark hair. She has the sort of smile that could light up whole cities, and the gray eyes made to gaze upon them.

She will be something more to him, one day; something brighter and vaster and move beloved yet. But for now she is merely a girl he has gazed at through his windows so many times before, her thin frame alight with an energy barely contained in his arms at the moment. Even in his dreams, she hums with electric and avid energy, until he cannot bring himself to look away from her laughing face and corona of her dark hair.

"I'm Jo March," she says, and everything she says rings with sincerity, so strange, and vibrant, and _rare._ "And just who were you staring at?"

He tells her a half-truth his very first day, even points out her sister as an attraction so as not to frighten her away at first glance. But the truth is, even then, he has eyes for her and her alone, over and above any one else.

If he was honest, he would have said: _Only you, because I think there will only ever __be_ you. But instead he had lied, and for the first time won her hand.

In his dreams, they dance and keep on dancing, together until the end.  


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**Author's Note**: As always, I adore and cherish reviews-- they really motivate me to continue on with what I started!

Additionally, I would love it if people could suggest scenarios for me to catapult Jo and Laurie into as married people! I already have them sneaking off into a dance hall with Jo in drag (and you can't _imagine_ what filthy favors she had to promise to get him to help her do that ;), am sketching out how they end up with quite a number of lunatic children (though I promise, they'll stay in the background and not overwhelm!), and am hard at work getting Jo and Laurie to have at least one explosive argument that needs a good resolution. Anyone else have any ideas of what they could do to occupy 40+ years of married time?


	2. The Honeymoon Bed

Part two of this story is up already! I know it's already been three days but it's hard _not_ to write Jo and Laurie being blissfully happy, if only because they're so ridiculously awesome to in that state. The playfulness, the sexiness, the oh-so-fun banter! When they finally manage to straighten themselves out of marrying other people, they can honestly be hilarious together.

Thanks again for the lovely reviews for part 1 of the story! I know it wasn't the most dynamic part of the story but once you reach the end of all 20 pieces, you'll see why it was written...

**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 2/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstance. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**  


* * *

**2. **

He tells her of his true answer only on their wedding night, after six long years of wanting and finally winning her, after he thought she was bound enough by the ties of holy matrimony to not run shrieking from him at the first sign of long fascination.

She listens attentively at first, the very picture of understanding as she had sat, flushed and smiling, at the edge of their marital bed. Soon enough, though, Jo is Jo, and the perfect portrait of the adoring bride she had been painting collapses, as she makes one of her strange yowling animal sounds and hides her face from him. And though at first he is surprised and not a little alarmed at her reaction, he has to laugh as well when he realizes that she's merely been overcome by her amusement, whimpering it into her hands.

"Oh, Teddy," she says softly when she can finally look up, her mouth trembling somewhere between love and embarrassment. "I knew you were mad from the day you proposed to me... and the way you came back from Europe only to try and win me again didn't say much for your reasoning abilities either. Honestly, old friend..."

She touches her knee and he is before her in an instant, his hands clasped in the way he has done a thousand times before, as he had looked up through March windows to trace her figure as she had galloped past. Somehow, her rough hands find his hair.

"I wouldn't have loved you if you weren't already a bit off, or already my sort of lunatic. After all, did you really think I hadn't cottoned on before? Or that my own thoughts through those years were occupied by nothing more than literature and theatrics?"

"I," he says, and somehow he finds his heart aching all over. He has to clear his throat before he can continue with it. "I suppose a part of me always knew you were mad, bad, and dangerous to know. A terrible influence on my young mind, I imagine."

"Yes," she agrees, and the hand she has on her curls somehow migrate mysteriously, now running down his trembling back. "Yes, I am. And perhaps you shall presently repay me for being as much? Show me, perhaps, another way to dance?"

His breath catches again, for a more carnal reason. "Jo, do you know what you're asking of me? It's... it's rather a leap from what we've shared yet."

She purses her mouth and pretends to look thoughtful. "Oh, I know. But you know how _I_ am, don't you? Always trying to scandalize the world with a new way of thrusting my limbs into the air."

He smiles at her with a not-terribly-civilized smile, and the world seems to know just enough to recede momentarily for them. "Jo, I'll show you how to move whatever it is you want to move. I'll even show you how to _minuet._"

"Oh good," she says, and somehow manages a laugh even after he lunges at her. "I've always wanted to learn those steps."  


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**Author's Note**: As always, comments and criticisms are loved, cherished and welcome! To put it pretty shamelessly, with me, more crit means more (or at least more quickly written) fic. ;)

Also, I really invite ideas for stories and drabbles for this piece. I've only completed about half the 20 planned parts and I especially need ideas for Jo and Laurie in their later years, after their children have grown up and ran away from their loving but chaotic mad-house. Anyone have any suggestions and what-not? Thanks again to the magnificent Emerald for playing around previously!


	3. Practice Makes Perfect

And so, part 3 of this story goes up! The joy of writing a series of shorts for a couple you love is really getting to write them so frequently, and in so many different situations. I can't wait until I get to write their honeymoon antics properly... now _that_ is going to be wicked fun!

I should also probably mention that this series IS mostly compatible with A Night to Remember. The scenes from the wedding night might be a little different in terms of dialog but everything that comes during Jo and Laurie's marriage is consistent with the ANTR series. You don't need to read this series to understand the other but I did want to offer a fairly consistent portrait of how Jo and Laurie might get along.

Thanks as always for the reviews and encouragement, and I hope you keep reading!

**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 3/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstance. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**

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**3. **

Dawn comes all too soon for them and he is wrung out, laughing tenderness and exhaustion into her dark hair. The rising sun paints her in stripes of coral and amber, and their bodies seem to press everywhere. He looks at her and he sees his future; he looks at her and glimpses his past.

He once told her: _my parents would have adored you if only they'd had the chance._

He had never told her: _I worry all the time that one day, you will fly away just like them._

"Don't leave," he whispers beneath her throat, feeling her skin shiver between her breasts. "Don't go, don't stray, don't fall away. I don't think my heart could bear it again."

He has never told her but in her luminous eyes, he can already see his secrets.

"Don't worry," she says, and her voice is sweet and low, until he knows she understands. "I think, this time, I'm yours for keeps. You can't return me even for store credit."

"That's good to know," he returns, and his heart rumbles low in his throat. "Your bag of escape tricks really had been confounding me for a few years yet."

She grins in that marvelous way he doesn't entirely trust, the shyness she still felt between their bodies slowly disappearing like so much mist. "Oh, I've gone on to learn a few new ones entirely! And if you don't mind a demonstration..."

Her hands tremble a bit when she reaches down, but her eyes are steady and alight with purpose. His hips jerk beneath her questing fingers, and when he finally manages to speak, he's a little breathless from her calluses.

"How long," he whispers against the soft coils of her serpentine hair, "have you known how to handle me so well?"

"Just now, but I'm naturally gifted," she loftily declares, her mouth running along in the way he knew it did only when she was nervous. "A prodigy, you might imagine! Give me the slightest bit of clue as to what to do and off I go with that! I bet in a few years, you'll be old before your time because of my expertise in lovering and hovering. It'll be very sad when you die early, although I'm sure you'll do so very happy. Afterward, I'll tell Amy to paint you so the children can admire you in your blooming, pre-Jo youth, and put up a very nice memorial plaque."

He guffaws against her hair and she snickers into his neck, and he wonders again why they hadn't done this before, why they had wasted so many years, why they had let so much time slip past their fingers when they could have _had_ this, this strangeness, this happiness, this joy mixed with sheer madness.

"I'm sure I will," he tells her, a little helpless before her imagination, and then smiles again as she closes her eyes, clearly dramatically sketching out both of their tragic but very noble deaths, adding even more color to their already saturated proceedings.

Finally, she asks, very softly, "Did you really like the night that we spent together, Teddy? It wasn't... so very bad? Not even what I did just now?"

He knows he probably ought to be more sensitive but it's all he can do not to roll his eyes at how easily and how often she misses the point with him. "God, Jo, how could you doubt I enjoyed myself? If I liked what we shared any more, I probably would have exploded by now, leaving little bits of Teddy raining down all over."

"What?" she asks, looking confused. "Didn't that already happen last night? All over my legs and on my dr--?"

And then her face glows bright red in agonizing embarrassment at what she's just said while he howls his amusement.

He stops only when she's at the point where she looks increasingly homicidal, and when thrown shoes look about the only thing that'd pass between them. And now that they're married, even her annoyance doesn't keep him from thoroughly kissing her, petting and cosetting her into a state of mere annoyance.

"How could you think that?" he asks when he finishes, tender and curious, both amused and embarrassed. "How could you think I didn't like-- no, _love_-- being with you? Getting to hold you, touch you, do everything and anything I could think of to please you? Is it because you-- you didn't like it either?"

He had worried about that: that he would be too hasty, too greedy, move too swiftly in search of his pleasure and accidentally leave behind hers. And at least at first, he had thought he had carried it off quite well, using his hand and his lips and the angle of his hips to give her every pleasure his feverish mind could imagine. In turn, she had moaned against him, had guided his own fingers toward and within her skin, had whispered his name is soft surrender as she had given herself over. She had said _oh, please_ and _don't stop_ and even _thank you_ after it had been done.

And yet--

Yet he had still wondered, in the morning after. Wondered, even as he had thought: _I can't lose this. I couldn't bear it. Never her. Not again._

"Of course not," Jo says, sounding peevish, annoyed, and thoroughly confounding, the girl he loves and the woman he has married, dream and reality all at once. "It's just strange to do something without even really _knowing_ what I'm doing. That's all. Although..."

If the previous grin had been untrustworthy, this one of hers could be a highwayman. He really ought to learn to be more careful around this bewitching woman. "Although we _could_ address the situations with a few more dancing lessons. After all, I've always been an _excellent_ pupil. Now, before I lose my nerve-- what other dances do you know? Have you got any more lessons?"

"Oh," he said finally, after he had finished thanking the Lord for his fortune assiduously. "I thought you'd never ask."

They spend the next three days going over the syllabus very carefully in their bed and Laurie's more thrilled to assign hard work than even ol' Brooke had ever, ever been.

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**Author's Note**: I am, by the way, up to the point where I'm tentatively sketching out children for Jo and Laurie. Wouldn't it be fun if they ended up having a really big, wild family? Although for some reason, my mind keeps insisting that if they mated, they'd end up having... Anne of Green Gables (?!). Any suggestions on what to do and the number? ;)


	4. Swanning About Society

Another week, another chapter! Simply because this story is so fun to write and so easy to update, I'm going to try putting up a new chapter up every Tuesday/Wednesday, with an option for putting another up on the weekend if I can't write anything else. (Although I really should... _how_ long have I kept people waiting for the next chapter of A Night to Remember? Poor Laurie's been waiting approximately three months to _finally_ get some consummation from his marriage... it'd be cruel to make him wait much longer. Especially when there's Jo's kinky demands to deal with...)

In any case, thanks as always for the lovely reviews and I hope you keep following the story! Some of my favorite chapters are coming up, although I do like the ones I've put up already...

**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 4/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstance. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**

* * *

**4. **

She is named like a boy and is just as rough and tumble, her dark hair forever astray from her dear face and long forehead. His name belongs properly to a girl, and he is groomed much like one, his hair sleek and his skin soft, his trim form always dressed in the latest fashions. He moves some of the finest circles in Paris with enviable grace, while she struggles not to trip over her own feet in a more public dance. He always knows what to say while words trip off her tongue in a less-than-stylish fashion. Where he is grace, she is haste, and when they walk arm and arm in public places, they sometimes draw stares for looking so mismatched.

They are a living contradiction together, and yet.

("I know you and you know me," she explains to him when he asks for reasons. "And no one else in the world can make me quite so happy or sad."

He says nothing, only stares at her intently, memorizing her and the moment.

"What?" she asks finally, looking worried. "Do I have fireflies in my hair again?")

Somehow, they make sense.

For their honeymoon, they visit the Old Continent for the first time in their young married life-- and Laurie can only be horribly amused by the figurative carnage they leave behind in all the parlors that greet them.

It really comes as no surprise; he has, after all, married a woman who had first introduced herself by speculating on whether or not he had raised a European captive in his native land. Jo took to civil, polite, meaningless society conversation in much the same way a band of vikings might take to a huddle of monkish men-- and left much the same aftermath. After a visit from her, many a society matron threw up their hands and wondered when the barbarian onslaught would end. It's far more entertainment than he ever thought possible in the 'brilliant' yet somehow deadly dull salons of Paris.

She bites her lip nervously after the first of those visits, and will not allow herself to look at him. And it is only when they are back in their suite in splendid solitude once more does she turn her white face to him and whisper, "I'm sorry, Teddy. Forgive me for the disaster tonight! I will do better soon, I promise."

Half-way through replaying the evening with a lazy smile, he looks up. "What on earth do you mean?" he asks.

She turns a furious red and looks down at her bare fingers; she's lost her gloves once again. "I know your business partners probably assume you've ended up accidentally marrying an overdressed savage after that dinner party, if not a shaved orangutan. I made such a mess of things in front of all those fine ladies, didn't I? I felt like a fool among them."

Faced with her trembling lower lip, he turns contrite for a second, and presses a kiss to her hair. "Then we'll have to avoid them in the future; they rather frighten me as well." And when he sees that fails to press her customary light back in her eyes, he eases his hand down her rigid back and sighs against her neck. "And I really do mean that, Jo. They rather remind me of praying mantises. Do you think I'd ever want you to alter yourself to fit in better with _them_?"

"Well," she answers, still looking wry, "I truly could probably use a few improvements. Especially in the social department."

"In which case," he murmured, unable to keep himself from kissing her soft cheek, "you may as well also take me in for repairs. I could use a bit of a spruce-up myself; my axle wheel's all rusted in the back."

She laughs as he wants but something a little fragile stirs in her voice nonetheless. "Oh, don't make fun, please! Not here! I just..."

He's never liked seeing her dispirited. Not his Jo. Not bound to earth when she should be soaring high above all other humans.

"I just want to make things right for you and I... I hate..."

She looks contrite and he has no idea why, can't even begin to imagine.

"I hate," she whispers softly at last, "that I apparently _can't_."

And she would say something more except his lips are once again on her, trying to steal away all her grief with everything he has. He kisses her breathless, weightless, shameless and endless, trying to reassure her with all he can. And it's only when she's properly trembling and twisting in his arms, that he allows himself to laugh.

"What in the whole wide world," he tells her, and flashes a grin, "makes you think something as ridiculous as _that_?"

Unfortunately, Jo looks a bit too flustered still to respond in the way he had hope for. "Oh, I don't know," she murmurs instead, pushing him away with her deft little hands. "I suppose it was something about the way you introduced them as friends and people in your general social circle that made me wonder if perhaps you'd like me to make a good impression on them."

He sighs and cocks his head, still puzzled for all her explanations. "Wait, don't tell me. You actually took that _seriously?_"

She looks at him as though he'd announced that he had just arrived from another world and came bearing words of peace for the earth men. "Oh, hold on now... you mean tell me that they really _weren't_?"

"You _are_ my best friend," he points out, lips quirking into an irrepressible grin. "Wife or no, you remain forever in that station. And as far as my calculations about how much they're worth to me have gone, they're only worth... oh... about one-thousandth of what you are. So in any gathering under that number, my concern for _you_ far outweighs whatever I feel for them."

"That makes neither mathematical nor social sense," she tells him, although her mouth quirks up into that pleased smile of hers that he's been getting to know so well. "And also, Teddy, you're wonderful but you're additionally sort of a crazy person."

"But in a completely different way than you are. So that must mean we balance out quite well."

"That doesn't make any sense either," she murmurs, although her lips can't quite hide her smile even behind her curtain of hair.

"It makes all the sense in the world," he promises her, and chucks her gently below the chin so he can look at that smile properly again. "Remember what you said about us being a common species of lunatic?"

"Well, right now, you're making us seem as though we don't really have much lunacy in _common_..."

"And that's part of our charm," he airily promises, and presses a light kiss to her neck. When she gasps and tilts it back further, he leisurely goes on between caresses. "And anyway, who cares what they think of me?"

"Even when," she says when he doesn't have her lips otherwise occupied, "they think you've married a shaved orangutan?"

"Even when they manage that extraordinary stupidity," he murmurs against her nose and cheeks. "After all, it's not as though most of _them_ are any better. I happen to know a good quarter of them are opium addicts, the other quarter married to them keep mistresses on streets their wives would faint to go near, _another_ quarter consists of bitter, miserable people who torment and gossip about others to make themselves feel just a little bit better about their wasted lives and the remainders left over..."

She smiles, not looking nearly as shocked as he has hoped for. Her time as an independent in New York really _did_ make her a great deal less naive that she had been before. "Can't come up to say anything about them?"

"There's not much worth saying when they're hopelessly proper and boring," he concludes primly, while she laughs. "So you see, you've got nothing to worry about! Oh, they can gossip about you and your lack of gloves and the way you accidentally destroyed their china for quite a while--"

"It wasn't my fault I've got uncoordinated elbows!" Jo wails.

"--But," Laurie continues on doggedly, "it's not as though they've got the collective power to-- God only knows-- chuck me out of my damn station. As long as I've got the money and the name, we can both move in and out of those circles as we please. You'd probably actually have to kill someone in order to be exiled permanently."

"Did I mention I've got uncoordinated elbows"" Jo asks plaintively. "I might one day, you never know. Although I probably wouldn't be morally at fault."

"I like your elbows," he insists stubbornly. "I've made their acquaintance very well over the last few weeks and I don't even mind having them shoved into my collar as we sleep anymore. And you don't need to fret so. I'll keep you from being convicted for homicide if I must and you, in turn, will have to promise me that you won't have to worry about this anymore."

"You say this only because I haven't actually gone and earned the death of someone. We'll see if you change your tune should the law ever come." And she smiles at him again-- that soft, radiant, self-doubting smile of hers that would always occupy a part of his soul. "And you're sure that having a social laughing-stock of a wife won't bother you at the least? Or bring you any trouble?"

"Absolutely sure," he promises with all his heart, and bends down to hold her once more. "It'd be illogical to be otherwise. After all, dearest Jo, you're worth a thousand of them put together, remember?"

"That still doesn't make any sense," she murmurs as she presses her hands tenderly to his chest. "And you are still a crazy person."

"So we've got something in common after all," he whispers, and takes advantage of her resulting laugh to kiss her senseless and pliant in his loving arms once more.

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**Author's Note**: Thanks to Mezzo for giving me the idea of having Jo meet with-- and scandalize!-- Laurie's high society "friends." (Although given the fact that his version of going wild meant hanging around with them all the time, I wonder how friendly he truly is with them!) Jo probably _would_ stand out like a sore thumb amidst a sea of properly manicured pinkies among them... but that's part of the _fun_, no? ;)

And as always, I love and adore questions, comments and constructive criticism. And if you have any story ideas, please bring them forward! If they strike my fancy (like Emerald's _brilliant_ fencing idea), they'll show up in this story sooner or later.


	5. A Shave?

Finally... a new chapter of 20 Different Ways! I'm in just as great a state of shock as you all are, I swear. ;) In any case, forgive me for not updating as regularly as I had planned. All these other fics got in the way and although I've had this chapter done for a bit, I just didn't couldn't find a good time to put it up. But ah well... I suppose there's no time like the present!

In any case, this chapter is for Dream's Sister. I'm so glad you're back in the fandom... I've missed your thoughtfulness while you were gone! And thanks again for helping out with the fantastic crit for a certain future (and explosive) chapter of this fic. Ah, the explosions that'll come out of that will be so much fun to detonate...

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**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 5/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstance. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**

* * *

It takes Laurie an abnormally long time to realize that Jo doesn't quite like what he's growing on his lip and chin.

To be fair, though, it's at least partly clouded over by the enthusiasm with which she tackles him throughout their honeymoon years. He's known passion before, of course-- had seen it erupt between other young men and women, had seen what it had done to his parents, had known intimately how it could disrupt the working order of the world no matter how much society tried to regulate it. It had, after all, been one of (though not the only) reason he had come back from Europe to claim the only one he had ever loved, and led them both to humble themselves in order to touch each other again.

And how they touch each other now! Enthusiastically, wantonly, sometimes entirely gracelessly-- and always in a way that can surprise the both of them. They kiss under the lights of Paris and in the fog of London, floating above the waters of Venice and within the tulip fields of Holland. They fumble, they play, they writhe and they lave, and more than once, they've had to make a grand escape from some all-too-public place with Jo skipping frantically in front of him as he tries to run from night-watchmen with his belt come undone just moments before by her deliciously grubby little hands.

(At first, he'd been more than a little shocked by her daring but seeing as how she'd always blame it on him and his devilish wiles after tumbling with him, he had remembered just how well Jo could repress and deny contradictory bits of herself.

"It's all your fault" seems to be her new motto but he takes to it like a man.)

Given all that, it's naturally not easy to pick up on the fact that she isn't much inclined towards facial hair. In fact, he only figures it out himself when he wakes up one day in Gay Pare'e-- to find his beard lopped off by a good two inches.

He ends up looking rather like some second-rate, half-ravished villain out of a third-rate Dickens theater production. And though Laurie can endure a great deal out of love, he takes what he considers a highly justifiable pride in his gentlemanly appearance-- a noble pride he rather wishes wasn't currently being injured.

"Maybe you were-- ah-- sleep shaving," sputters Jo, giving the least convincing explanation he had heard from a woman since Eve had tired to justify biting into an apple by talking up the health benefits of fresh vegetation. "Yes, that's it-- you were sleep shaving! After months of looking like a whiskered sea lion, the inner you decided that enough was enough and that you needed to liberate your-- youthful youth and, ah, beauteous beauty--"

"Whiskered... sea... lion..." His words come out as flat as the heavy Dickens tome that sits at her elbows now and that he half wishes to beat his poor, mutilated face against.

"A very dashing whiskered sea lion!" she interrupts with a cry, torn between looking ashamed and looking amused. "The bestest and most elegant one in all the land!"

A little mollified, he turned his face, showing off what he knew to be a rather magnificent profile. "But still. A whiskered sea lion? Dearest, you couldn't find a more flattering example from the animal kingdom?"

She twitches a bit, and he knows it is only out of remorse for the injury that she'd done that she hadn't begun to tease him relentlessly about his minor-- _minor_!-- vanity. "I could come up with even less flattering descriptions! And honestly, I don't know why you've kept that growing on you for so long. You look and feel oh-so-much better without it, Teddy, you truly do. And if it was just about your appearance-- well, you know I don't find good looks so very interesting and I wouldn't even care except-- oh, it feels like a wild brush when it touches me! Especially when--"

He has to stop the bitter tirade within his own skull when he sees the pretty blush beginning to form upon her dear face, and extend down to even more private facets.

(To give his wonderful she-devil her due, she truly did know how to distract him.)

"Especially when..." Though she tries to continue, the words don't quite seem to come to mind, tearing him in half between curiosity and amusement. "I mean... _especially_ when..."

"Go on," he tells her encouraging, indignation melting in the face of the development of something truly promising. "I'll keep mum to the world about this, I swear."

"You had better," she mutters rebelliously. "Or else, I'll kill you, ask Amy to help me grind you into some glorious paints for her delicate artistic palette, and flee the entire continent as a treacherous black widow of a woman."

"Probably poetic justice," he agrees. "But you still haven't finished your sentence."

She struggles for a bit longer as he watches with interest, turning more shades of crimson than even Amy had managed to turn out in canvasses. Finally, though, she had paused and then, almost meekly (if such an adjective had ever been applied to anything she had ever done, ever), asked if he remembered what had happened on their wedding night, with all the lovering and-- even more importantly-- improvised _lickering_...

"I simply wanted to know what it would... oh you know... feel like if I didn't have to worry about being... inconvenienced afterward," Jo miserably says. "And now that I told you this, I bet you'll never, ever do that to me again. I bet you think now that I'm hideous and diseased! You'll probably cast me out and I'll be like a newly-married outcast leper. One without even a colony, if you can imagine!"

One day, he tells himself, he'll tell her that no matter how much nonsense she sputters, he'd never think of letting her run away from him again. Even if they became a pair of lepers losing limbs together, he thought they could be happy together, as long as Jo was still his.

"Hold on a moment," he tells her, pausing to brush one last whiskered sea-lion kiss against her soft lips. "Let's see if you were right to think our lovering would be far better without bringing all the facial hair in."

His hastiness in shaving brings him substantially more nicks and cuts than even she's comfortable with. But it's all worth it when they discover-- quite to their delight-- that it truly, truly _is_.

* * *

**Author's Note**: Heh. Heh. Heh. Sorry for the self-indulgence but I _had _to come up with a way to get Laurie to ditch those awful mustache/goatee combo in the latter parts of the Little Women movie that made him look like a cross between the Hamburgler, Chester the Molester and a really creepy version of Jesus. And since aesthetics alone wouldn't do it for Jo... I had to improvise. Promise you'll forgive me this lapse? ;)

I'm also still happy to solicit ideas for this fic so if you have them, please feel free to share them with me in reviews or private messages. And Emerald, your fencing idea appears to be blooming in chapter 12. Would you like me to message you the chapter as I have it so far or wait until it goes up? It's up to you, dear!


	6. Row Row Row Your Boat

Another week, another chapter. Thank you so much for keeping up with this story, dear reader, and for making it such a joy to write! Although I have to confess to you... I'm sketching out Jo and Laurie's final years together and I actually ended up _crying _at one point thinking on it. I recently had the chance to watch the brilliant Pixar film _Up _and... well, let's just say it inspired me in many different ways!

Thanks goes to the lovely Elisabeth Harker for helping me with this!

* * *

**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 6/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstances. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**

* * *

**6.**

He learns never to tell her directly how much he loves her, unless he suddenly wants to see her clam up, go red, and possibly throw something at him in her ire.

There are a great many things about Jo that confuse him rather a lot, of which this was only one. In Laurie's not-inconsiderable experience with women and indeed, with people as a whole, most quite enjoyed being complimented on their appearance, their carriage, their general amiability and their manners. Women preened, men looked proud, and even the most roustabout louts tended to at least be a little thankful in exchange for earning about a man's regard.

Jo, on the other hand, generally took to compliments about as well as she took to kitchens in general and ovens in particular. Nothing was often left of what came about besides a general, flaming mess and possibly a lot of people screaming as they ran in the the other direction. When he tells her that he loves her, her first impulse always seems less to return it than to ask him if he'd been drinking before and if so, wouldn't a cold shower be in order? When he tells her that he'd been a fool to think he'd be as happy with anyone else, she tells him that must be because she caught him while he was oh-so-young and ever so impressionable. And when he takes her in his arms, although she never look so much as tempted to refuse, she tells him that he really ought to get his eyes checked.

"But only after the honeymoon," she says, laughing softly, one of her warm, callused hands stroking his damp curls as he pressed his face to her bare stomach. "I think I rather enjoy your visual delusions about my desirability here."

"Then let me be blind all my life," Laurie replies, knowing she would only pinch him if he told her he found her lovely just as she was. "If I have you, why do I need vision?"

"But what about depth-perception?" she returns, ever the little skeptic. "And trying to play the piano? And walking home in the dark? It might seem all grand and romantic for the present but I'm assuming you'll need proper sight sooner or later!"

"It worked out for Jane Eyre and her Mr. Rochester," he points out, remembering the novel that she had loved and acted out so often with him, her voice bright and excited and warm. "So why not for us?"

Her fingers abruptly tighten at his hair, and he lets her tug him back up, until his face is so close to hers that he could have seen the amusement there even if his vision was truly off. "So you're saying you're planning on eventually letting me in on the crazy wife you've kept cooped up in some castle in England all this time? If I wasn't afraid of your dramatic streak before, dear Teddy, I think I'm getting there!"

"You ought to be," he informs her mock-indignantly. "Truth be told, I'm planning on making _you_ the crazy wife that I'll have to hide from company whenever they come over." And his life probably would have ended in his wife's loving arms then and there had he not pressed his lips flush to hers and distracted her with more pressing matters.

It would be easier if she'd let him tell her everything he felt, without needing subterfuge or verbal camouflage. It wouldn't require him needing to resort to Italian or insult her at every turn just to let him tell her how much he loves her. But this is the way Jo does things, the way that life with Jo has worked out. Upside down and inside out, as though she deliberately enjoyed throwing a wrench in the world's workings and internal cogs.

He probably ought to mind that more.

But if the truth must be told, he thinks he understands.

He takes her to the lake in Europe that he had once spent hours within with her sister, back when he had thought that he might have room in his heart for someone else to love. He takes her to make reparations for himself, and to overlap the life he has now with the one he had been tempted by in the Jo-less days that had spread joylessly before her. He takes her and they row out into the middle of the calm waters, until the present overlaps with the past and he feels as though he can come to terms will all that's changed just now.

When it had been he and Amy on that little row-boat out in the middle of Nice's waters, the winds had been kind and the waters had been temperate and they had rowed with each other serenely, without needing to argue about it, sensible and well-matched and without even an inch of displeasure. Her voice had been sweet and calm and her words eminently reasonable, and her hands had been pleasant on his when she had pressed them forward to help him row further.

Amy had been like an idol he could have kept to all his life, one that would have shaped him to be safe, sane, gentle and sensible, a young lord of the manor rather than a rash rascal who hungered for innovation and adventure. She had put her hand in his and he had known that what she had been offering was what he ought to want: a quiet life, a peaceful sort of love, a calm, temperate, easy existence where he would never again have to feel the pain of wanting something that did not want him, or striving for an artistic genius that might forever elude his meager compositional powers.

She would have made his life very easy, he knows. Easy and simple and sweet and as unsurprising as the day was long. Like a standard bouquet of flowers delivered every day at a standard hour, forever being sent to him from a single admirer.

When he and Jo go out on that little row-boat in the middle of Nice's waters, it is-- to put it bluntly-- something of a complete disaster. Trying for artistic comparisons, she had compared his way of rowing to watching a skinny stick-insect trying to ford a river, and then became confused when he got upset. She had leaned over to try and look at the bottom of the lake and might have drowned if he hadn't caught her by the back of her dress before she'd fatally unbalanced. She had tried to help him by wrestling an oar away from him and somehow managed to simultaneously hit them both with it-- dislodging his very surprised form from the boat while she only managed to keep herself on it with a set of long fingernails that kept in shape by raking themselves frequently down his back.

If life with Amy would have been like a bouquet of flowers-- beautiful, predictable, easy to handle-- life with Jo's rather more like booby-trapped mystery present. Not only did a man never quite know what he'd receive, he was apt to occasionally be poisoned.

"Jo," he finally says, his soaked form blearily gazing at her after resurfacing from his impromptu dunking, "do you know what we talked about before, with Mr. Rochester's way of dealing with crazy women?"

"He was fictional!" she sputters, in that way of hers that she clings to when she knows very well that she's done something very, very wrong. "Fictional, Teddy-- _fictional_! A man can't really go about confining all the wives he ends up with!"

"Oh, I don't know," he drawls, and one of his hands gently begins to rock on the edge of the boat while Jo gazes on with horror. "I rather find his creativity in dealing with the situation admirable. And you _can_ swim, yes?"

"Absolutely not!" she cries in a rather shocking lie, given that he'd taught her how to just the other week, and wore a very simple summer dress that'd float with his help. "Oh don't you dare-- Teddy, I swear, I'll never forgive you--"

"I have faith in your compassion," he says sweetly, and then tips the boat in such an angle that makes her all but topple over into his wet arms.

It's a miracle they don't drown in the commotion afterward. But after he finally has a firm grip on her slippery form and she lets him drag her out of the waters, they collapse on the river-bank, gasping and sputtering and half-dying with laughter, knowing that all the respectable gentry around them were staring but not really caring all that much, not when they had each other, soggy lack of dignity and all.

"Don't laugh!" she cries, howling herself. "Those looks of yours don't improve much when you're water-logged!"

He throws himself on his back, coughs up a little more water, and turns his head to the side so he can see her now. She doesn't look at her best herself, with her glorious hair half-stuck to a mud-streaked face that was all crumpled up to hide amusement from his perfectly sharp eyes and happily candid mouth. She would never be half as pretty as Amy, would never be so demurely poised or serene, would never so perfect in her manners or her virtues either. She would never be anything like her sensible and lovely sister, who would have calmly curbed his excesses and never let him do anything as unseemly as what he had just pulled, who would never have accidentally hit him across the skull and careening him into lake waters.

Jo never makes things easy, not verbally or physically, and Laurie knows he probably ought to mind that more. Any sensible man ought.

"Oh, I don't know," he says once more, almost philosophically, suppressing a grin. "That's a hasty conclusion to take in. It might! We ought to try this adventure again, Jo. For the sake of satisfying our curiosity. Only, next time, we should do this at night. And without so many clothes on."

And when he gets up to sprint away from her watery wrath, thanking God for making her 20 extra pounds of water-soaked linen as heavy as it is, he decides-- all other things being equal-- he quite enjoys the fate he ended up with now.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Thanks again! And as always, reviews and suggestions about the story motivate me to keep writing and are very much appreciated-- especially about Jo and Laurie's final years of wedded bliss. ;)


	7. Chorus Line

It's been quite a while since my last update-- you can blame my recent vacation for that! But I'm back and I'm happy to be posting again and there'll be yet more fic coming up soon. This weekend, I'm updating Dark Scribe and soon, a friend (madwomanpoems) will hopefully help me finish up the first chapter of a Newsies/Little Women crossover. Does anyone feel up for some Jack/Jo fic? Oh, Jo could have so much _fun_ with Laurie's Brooklyn-accented doppleganger!

And as always, thank you for reading and enjoying this story! Please review if you've enjoyed or have constructive crit to give-- it only makes me want to update more. ;)

* * *

**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 7/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstances. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**

* * *

**7. **

After it is over, he forbids her to ever talk about that _trip_ they made to the most notorious dance hall on the continent last night, on pain of death.

("Mine or your own?" she asks thoughtfully, over breakfast the morning after. "I think it's good information to know before I can reply to that."

"Mine through sheer humiliation," he replies, and buries his face in his hands.

"Then I'll keep mum about the whole night," she promises, and grins. "I'd rather like to keep you just yet.")

He knows, from the start, that it would be a terrible business. If he had had the sense that God had given to a sea-gull, he would have stayed away from it. But Jo insists and pleads and rationalizes it on behalf of her art, for days upon days on end. And when that had failed, she pulls out her most dangerous weapons.

"Why?" she asks, and the breathy quality of her voice would have made him laugh if he wasn't currently so nervous.

"Jo," he says, and tries to sound stern, "I am _not_ taking you to a dance hall after dark. No matter what you swear you'll do. Not even if your revenge for failing to do so involves... involves... involves..."

"Cockroaches, curtain rods and curling irons, used in extremely peculiar combinations?"

He has to pause, half out of fear and half out of admiration. "I've always admired that creative mind of yours, dear. Only, not so much in this instance."

When threats wouldn't do, Jo has been known to lean on her charms instead, which is to her hapless husband an even more frightening tactic. He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstances.

"But what if I pick up a few interesting tricks from the painted ladies of the stage, Teddy? Wouldn't it be worth it then?"

He grinds his teeth to push back the images. "What in the world could they possibly teach?"

"Oh, I don't know," she said, and leans back dreamily in her chair. "I always did want dancing lessons-- proper ones, Teddy, although I much enjoyed what you've already taught me. I've always wanted to learn to use my thighs more... productively."

He woefully sighs, she triumphantly smiles, and he inwardly calls himself every filthy name he knows for being so very, _very_ weak.

After it is over, he's quite sure that an entire choir full of chorus girls think he's unavailable for reasons other than spousal devotion, which his wife does not help by sitting on his lap in order to keep them away-- while wearing a very convincing facial hair.

"The handsome ones are always either married or that way," some bitter dancer murmurs on the stage, and Jo laughs diabolically underneath her jaunty top-hat.

"Iiiiinteresting how they can see your shining virtue and fidelity to your wife even when she's-- hem hem-- not here, isn't it?" she asks, almost innocently.

"Very interesting indeed," he growls back at her, and even the great Santine spinning above them on a rope of diamonds can't compare to the sight of her mischievous smile. "Although I imagine if I run off with you, she wouldn't be best pleased!"

"Oh, don't worry," she murmurs, and way she nuzzles him with her false mustache in sight of a whole line of fuming chorus girls makes him want to die a little inside. "I'm sure that wild wife of yours will be very understanding."

Still, it's almost worth it when she surprises him by pinning him down to the back-alley after they make a hasty exit half-way through a big production. His eyes widen as they meet hers, a knowing gleam all too bright in that soft field of gray.

"Oh no," he says, and although he's certainly never refused her before, it may only be because she's never come to him for intimate caresses wearing a false mustache.

"Oh yes," she says, and her smile only widens. "Don't tell me those dancers didn't excite you in the least!"

Answering that would be suicide so he deftly avoids the question. "Aren't you supposed to be all, Lord, I don't know-- hopelessly demure and what have you? When I first met you, you would have shrieked if I had so much as bent down for a kiss."

Her hands find their way under his vest and shirt swiftly; despite his own indignation, he gasps. "Well, that was _before_ I married you, dear Teddy. And before I started realizing that my imagination could spin more than just adventures for other women."

He takes a quick breath and tries to ignore the feel of her hands on his belt-buckle, nails straying deliciously underneath. "I thought a wife was meant to be all staid and obedient, Jo! And not do-- _activities_ of this sort in _public_, to say the least!"

"Well, you know me," she murmurs, and the wicked glint in her eyes almost makes him moan and spend himself prematurely all over her practiced fingers. "I don't like to go about doing things conventionally. And this is all your fault anyhow, for finally throwing off that terrible set of whiskers and looking more irresistible than ever."

"Indeed?" he begins skeptically, but her hands soon find a way to divert his attention fully.

Afterward, his back is sore, her mustache is gone, and he knew he could never again darken the doors of the Moulin Rouge, even if he had wanted to after Jo and the most emasculating evening known to man. And wicked woman that she is, she only roars with laughter when he confesses the last in the morning after.

"I see I've finally found a fool-proof for wives to keep men from frequenting such places! I ought to patent my invention, Teddy-- I bet I could make a fortune off of such a thing."

"What?" he cries piteously. "Off the backs of husbands who yearn only for quiet and peace?"

"As long as there's profit in it," she admits shamelessly. And when he looks at her ruefully over fresh fruit and marmalade and tries hard not to look amused, she offers him a sip of her juice to make amends and doesn't look fooled in the least.

* * *

**Author's Note**: Oh, that was almost too much fun to write! And although this will be the last of the "honeymoon" chapters and Jo and Laurie will begin their regular life in the next part, I hope you've enjoyed reading them tearing up Europe together. Let's face it-- at their best, Jo and Laurie are troublemakers you simply _cannot_ keep down.

Please review if you're enjoyed! My heart's still a little sad at the fact that nobody on this site finished my last Little Women fic (the explicit Into the Woods) so it would be good to know if anyone enjoys my non-smut fic. ;)


	8. Trouble in Paradise

Sorry for the wait on this, darlings, and thank you so much for the lovely reviews! I can't believe I'm almost to fifty. ::squees happily:: The next few parts of the story have been a lot harder to write than the earlier parts because it's one where Jo and Laurie _aren't _perfectly happy and in love, simply because, well... all marriages have to go through rocky time and I don't want Jo and Laurie to have the same sort of effortless marriage Laurie has with Amy or Jo has with Bhaer. If their high points are much higher, their low points are also going to be _much _lower. But sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you can find your way back to the light again...

As always, thanks goes to the wonderful Elisabeth Harker for helping me figure out how to stage a fight and reconciliation. 3

**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 8/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstance. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**

* * *

**8.**

They move to New York soon after to start their new life. He had dreamed, once, of staying cozy and comfortable in Massachusetts, but he's promised to never impede any of Jo's dreams for being an important author, for living the literary life. He accommodates, for her sake, and even finds he can love some parts of it in an unexpected way. He grows to love making friends with other couples who gather his way, love the eclectic company she finds and makes, love finding new parts of the city to make her golden and gay, love picnics in open parks and gardens on Saturdays and lazy, languid limbed mornings in bed come Sunday.

But what he does not love kindles his secret resentment and in his heart starts a slow-growing fire.

She, of course, flings herself into the literary world with considerably more enthusiasm than he manages for his business affairs and states. And after a while, he finds himself jealous time after time; while he has to manfully restrain his urge to jump out of an office window every time he faces yet another half-finished stack of ledgers to pour through, she has the ability to stay comfortably at home and pour over her writing, spending their first months of marriage productively by collaborating with her muse and her friends and her beloved editorial men as much as she likes.

He wishes he could be like her; that he too could do everything he wishes to, with every reason to make an effort at his side. He wishes that her other men would not look at her so, would not seem so invested in being in her life. He wishes that he could be sure she doesn't regret him, that she doesn't wish she had run off with those intellectual men who could more involve themselves in her more literary pride.

He wishes, and the poison snake of resentment slithers its way to his mind.

She catches on eventually, of course; there's very little he can bring himself to hide from her, even his resentment. So they have their first real fight in their marriage four months in, and words that should have been unthinkable fly out into the night. She's always had a temper and his is not much better and though there's nothing in the world that could make him not love her, he wonders for hours afterward if she had once been right about how incompatible they are. If they really couldn't make their fiery temperaments reconcile. If they'd truly end up killing each other because he couldn't let her win every argument, not all the time.

"It isn't as though you're perfect either," he rages as he glares angrily at the wall beyond her, unable to bear the sight of her when she-- upset at him. "And if I had wanted to get reformed every bloody inch of my life for every bloody _day_ of my life, I would have married your sanctimonious little priss of a sister! So have _off_ it, Jo! Must you poke your nose into every single thing I feel?"

She draws back as though he had physically slapped her, although he would _never_-- no matter how angry he was, not even when he half-wanted to throttle sense back into her. "Don't bring Amy into this-- she isn't at fault! She doesn't deserved to be slandered here! And what do you expect me to _be_, anyway? You've been going around being just-- being cruel and cold these last few weeks! You... you're acting like a different person and this isn't _you_, Teddy, this isn't..."

Her voice goes ragged for no reason he can understand; he will still not gaze at her.

He doesn't want to _see_.

"Maybe this _is_ the real me," he finally replies. "Maybe you were right to reject me the first time. Maybe I'm simply not fit company."

"You don't mean that," she whispers, and her voice is still ragged. "You can't. I know you. You're just... lashing out presently because you're so... I know that your work hasn't exactly..."

"And the way you go about," he says, because he is a bastard, because he wants to hurt her, "the way you live your life, the way you work your charms on your editors, sometimes it makes me wonder if _you_ actually regret marrying--"

He never finished because she slaps him so hard across the face that he sees stars for a moment, a whole new universe of pain that he had never been exposed to previously. And when he comes to, three seconds later, her trembling face was all he could see.

"Get out," she says, "before I do something I really regret."

He leaves. There are tears in her eyes when he does so. He doesn't know what they mean.

He thinks of that as he goes wandering through the streets, his own eyes curiously bright. He had thought of that, and at the way her face had twisted up when she had yelled, and the hitch in her voice she always gets when she's about to break apart from the pressures of the night. He thinks of the partnership that they were making together: sometimes silly, often strange, enormous and often knotted and complex, not what he had fantasized of long before, but what he has now in his life.

He thinks of what it would be like if he had truly married Amy or another such wife. Life would have been simpler, no doubt. Life would be more like what everyone else seems to prize. It would be simple and calm and neat and uncomplicated, with both of them having their private functions to follow, and nothing in her tidy, domesticated world to make him feel inferior or jealous or deprived.

He thinks of what Jo had told him that night. That he was angry at her for no good reason. That he was unhappy with some other cause and foisting it off on her in his depression. That he had no right to make her feel as though she were betraying him for having others-- who were _only_ friends-- involved in her life. He remembers the sting of those words and knows that Jo had been precisely right.

He thinks that if he had chosen another bride, they wouldn't have dared told him the truth about himself because they never would have known it. He would never have let them into him, or flung at them the same bitter nouns and adjectives. He could never have been so angry, or jealous, or honest with them. They could never know as much about what thoughts lurked beneath his charming surface, that led him to self-destruct, time after time.

He thinks of all that and realizes that there's no use measuring Jo to any others, not when they don't matter. Not when she's already his fate and his world and his wife all in one, the only woman he's ever loved in his life.

When he comes back to their Brownstone home, she's on their front-step and he knows she's been waiting for him. He looks at her drawn face half-hidden in her hands, and his heart shatters in half as he sees the pain he's brought forward in those beloved eyes. And it's true, it's all true, what she's told him before.

_Nobody else makes me happier or sadder than you do. Nobody else can even try._

He looks at her as she avoids his gaze and knows that it's time to make amends.

* * *

**Author's Note**: I still haven't finished writing the next chapter but with luck-- and the help of a few good friends!-- it'll be up in a week or two. Thank you once again for reading and please do review if you enjoyed this chapter. It may be mad of me but I think I'm going to see if I can push over to 100 reviews before I finish this series. Hubristic and asking for a come-uppance? Oh yes. But let's face it... this giant ego of mine needs some humbling. ;)


	9. Reasoning and Resolving

This was most definitely the hardest chapter of this series so far and I could not have done it without the brilliant help of **Dream's Sister** and **Elisabeth Harker**, both of whom are writers in Fanfiction-dot-net and both of whom are so talented in writing Little Women fic that it's _scary._ Thanks again for the help, darlings. This could not have been done without your input!

**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 9/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstances. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**

_

* * *

9._

He begins to speak, softly and brokenly, and she looks up with a soft cry. He says: "There have probably been stupider people than I in the history of the world but I can't think of any right now, can you?"

She won't even look at him yet, her eyes focusing somewhere on her knees as she hastily wipes her face. "No, not quite yet. And I'm thinking that point might never come right about now."

He has to smile wryly, a curve of the lips she will not even glance at. "Ouch, Jo. Though I deserved that one."

She's silent for a long time, a sullen, sad collection of minutes that trudges by them both in the dark. And when she speaks, her voice is somewhere between frustrated and sad and still abominably aching.

"Yes. You did. You really did. I can't even go into how... how you made me... how..."

She sighs sharply and with the care afforded to dangerous animals, Laurie takes a seat next to her, feeling very, very small as she shifts to avoid touching him, her eyes still down.

"Yes," he says finally, when the silence takes them over. "And I'm sorry for it, Jo. I'm sorry. So, so very much. I'm sorry for... for being so petty and craven and jealous and beastly. I couldn't be more ashamed of what I put you through tonight if I had-- had--"

She sighs again and wraps her arms around herself. "Dressed me up as a tiki idol and thrown me into a volcano?"

He winces, can't help it. "I deserved that as well."

Jo actually laughs at that, a soft, low sound, though it finishes with another sigh afterward. "Give me a little more time, Teddy, and I'll find even more outlandish metaphors to describe what it feels like you've done to me."

He laughs almost in spite of himself, and then carefully, very slowly-- nothing could be so bad if Jo actually made a joke-- reaches for her hand. She lets him take it, and he feels her hand tremble in his beastly paw, and knows his heart breaks all over.

"You hurt me, Teddy," she said wearily, and his eyes burn as they turn toward her. "You hurt me so much these past few weeks, even before what happened just now, even before you left me in the dark. Before you, before this, I never knew that hearing someone walk away could make me feel as though I'm bleeding."

It's enough to make him feel about as large as a single scrap of scum-- and this is before she goes on, her usually bright voice so soft he has to prick his ears to hear her.

"You hurt me, and the worst part is that I don't know _why._ I don't know what it is that I did to offend you so much! I... I've always tried to be... _honest_--" (her voice breaks and his heart breaks with it) "with you about who I am and what I want. We both knew that I'd be writing after marriage, and that I wanted to keep some of my independence. If-- if you wanted some-- some fine pretty thing to keep your house and h-have impeccable taste and-- and entertain your b-business friends--"

"I don't!" he almost shouts, cutting her off mid-sentence. She nearly rises in surprise but then he takes her hand and she settles down and he tries to begin again.

"I... I'm sorry. But I don't. I truly don't. I don't want to marry a domestic slave or an angel in the house any more than I'd want to marry an-- an iguana! No, I'd want to marry that sort of woman even less. At least the iguana would keep life interesting!"

Her mouth wobbles a bit, although her eyes soften, and her voice has a trace of humor when she finally speaks again. "Teddy, if you are trying to make amends by comparing me to a cold-blooded reptile of extraordinary ugliness, you are sort of failing right here."

He laughs in spite of himself, in spite of the words he had previously given her, in spite of all the ways they've hurt each other and the ways they might keep wounding once again. And after a minute, after she tentatively touches his chest and he pulls her into a fierce, close hug, he tries to find better words to make his amends.

"That isn't what I meant," he says carefully, as her soft hair tickles the side of his chin. "There isn't anything in the world that I want more than you, dearest, loveliest, strangest, Jo, and I'll never regret choosing you in the end! You know that, don't you? I refuse to believe what we have is inferior to any other union."

For a moment, she lies still in his arms, her fingers soft against the beat of his breast. But when she pulls back and he sees the question in his eyes, he knows that even this apology won't quite mark the nights end.

"Then why were you so _angry_?" she asks, and her voice is soft and lost again. "I've seen you in a temper before but... but never one that built up so much or for so long. And I thought... I really thought..."

Pain in her eyes, flickering quick but bright, and he hates himself all over, wondering if this was an end.

"I thought," she says, like a woman slowly touching a wound, "you really hated me for a moment."

"That ought to be your line," he returns, feeling shame burn deep in him, "given what a colossal ass I've now been. Sometimes I feel as though I've never grown up from that boy who wanted to run away to Washington just to spite his oldest and most loving kin."

She almost laughs a little at the memory, her voice soft when she speaks again. "Is that what you wanted to do with me, Teddy? Spite me because you felt...?"

And then stops because she seems to have no idea how to finish that sentence.

So he finishes it for her, knowing what a wretch he is. "Jealous," he says, and wishes he were better for her. "Jealous and vicious with it."

Jo is trying, he knows, to understand this, but the eyes she raises to him now hold nothing more than questions. So he goes on, trying to explain the why of it to her, trying to make sense of his own reactions.

"Because I want what you had with your career," he whispers. "Because I wanted to love what I do every day as much as you can. And because when I failed-- and oh Jo, I fail, I _always_ fail-- I was as terrible as I've ever been."

And her eyes turn soft and her hand touches his face and he knows that he's being forgiven, that despite all he's done that she's already doing her best to understand it.

(She's better than he deserves, and she always has been.)

"Then what can we do?" she asks. "What would make you happy again?" And he knows that if he asked her for a piece of the sky, she would reach out and try to grab hold of it for him.

"I don't know," he finally answers, because no solution is present, for all the hope he can see blooming in her yet. "I just... I wish I could be as happy as you are in your life, Jo. That's... I think that's truly what it is."

A breath falls from her lips, low and quick, and he sees her building frustration. "But it's the same life that you share. My life is your life, Teddy, and if there's anything you want from it-- God, I would give it all to you as quickly as I possibly can!"

If he hadn't loved her for almost a half-decade already, he would have learned to in that instance.

"Oh Jo," he says, and his shaking fingers brush the damp hair back from her forehead."It's not like that. It's just that I'm hopelessly jealous of you. Of the respect that people give you. Of the accolades that you earned through nothing less than your own virtues. Of how you can wake up every day and feel that time spent working is not time spent wasted. Of how you know you are a help, not a hindrance, to the people who depend on you. Of how..."

Dare he say it, even to himself?

"Of how much you can _enjoy_ what you do," he finally says, feeling worn at the edge. "Of how happy you are in your own competence."

Her breath falls quick, this time on his face, as their mouths meet in a kiss again. And when she pulls back, her eyes are resolute and her lips are firm when she tells him to explain this all over again.

"Please," she says, and she is so beautiful he can barely stand it. "Please tell me what's wrong and we'll make a plan and I swear, Teddy, by every single drop of blood in me-- I swear, we'll make it right in the end."

With a sigh, Laurie looks down at his hands. They aren't trembling now, not anymore.  
But still, he can feel himself shake inward, shake with the thought of needing to actual confront-- honestly and without reservation-- what had made him so much a beast these past few weeks, what had made him so resent her.

He wishes he didn't have to. He wishes he didn't feel this way. And God help him, even now, he wishes she wouldn't push him so.

But she's as much Jo as she ever was and if she didn't make things easy now, he knows she's right in doing so.

So he does, her hand protectively covering his as he went on, his voice solemn, rough and low. And though he probably ought to burn in shame of what he has to relay-- of how shiftless, of how preposterous, of how _useless_ he is in his office-- somehow, he feels strangely grounded by her weight, her warmth, even the feel of her skin. Her fingers anchor him even as he speaks of how poorly things had been at work, and for how long; and her lips help him sort truth from lies as he talks about how very miserable it made him. Somehow, simply being with her made it easier to admit how alienated being with other men-- his _grandfather's_ men-- had made him feel his entire life.

"I hated them all," he admits savagely, at least once, and goes on only when he feels her hand still remaining in his. "I still hate them. I hate how pompous they were and still are. How cruel and how unfeeling, how disconnected from their fellow men. How they always made me think I was lesser than them simply because I wasn't quite as well bred. And now, to know that I'm wasting my music and grinding myself to the bone to be half as good as they are in moving around mere money from bank to bloody bank--"

He cut himself off abruptly, his lips twisting into an almost sardonic snarl.

"And the hell of it is that I'm not even good at it," he finally admits, his shoulders hunched up almost protectively. "That's the most shameful bit of it all."

She doesn't look at him as though she thinks its shameful. In fact, with those eyes blazing at him once again, she rather looked as though she was thinking of hitting him upside his head with a manuscript, as she sometimes did when she was aggravated at him beyond all reason.

"Why would you even--" she began, and then groans as she, perhaps, begins to understand it. "No, no, never-mind. I know you and I know _why_ you would think that. Even if it's terribly and stupidly _wrong._ Because it's _not_ shameful to hate something you're being forced to do, when you've no natural aptitude! You shouldn't be ashamed in this situation-- your grandfather ought! I've seen those awful ledgers of yours and they're enough to drive even the best men insane. They'd give any man -- your grandfather aside, of course -- a headache to last into the the next month. It's-- it's-- it's damned _stupid_ of you for feeling ashamed of such a thing!"

He felt his lips curl up into a tired little smile, even a he raised his downcast eyes to look up at her. She looks just as tired as he feels, and even more aggravated, sitting on the steps in an awkward bundle as her luminous eyes blaze right up at him.

"And my grandfather, should he lack headaches from the ledgers, might well lapse into a coma should I disappoint him once more. It's only been a year since I've been 'reformed,' Jo. Should he think I'm falling into my wild ways once more or-- heaven forbid-- turning into my _father_, he might well end up on his way to his grave. And I..."

And he closes his eyes and thinks of the old man, and disappointment, and how much he already owes, and owes, and owes, and how little he's given in repayment.

"I can't do that to him," Laurie whispers. "I'm all he now has left."

She sighs and he can hear the wind whistle between her teeth until it sounds almost like the music he knows he can never compose again.

"I could talk to him," she whispers. "I could-- I could try and tell him that this is-- it's hurting you, it's killing you bit by bit. That you're not suited to this work, that you've got much better talents. If I were in your place, Teddy-- oh, I would have lost my mind as you're losing it now. You're like-- like-- like a bird beating against its cage, about to break itself in half and bleed out freely. At the very least, you ought to-- out to-- ought to be able to sell off your share of the business or... come in less days or... or something of that nature! And if I talk to him-- he's always liked me, you _know_ he's always liked me-- he might think, he might _see_--"

And he closes his eyes and thinks of his mother.

"No," he says, very gently, as though if he spoke above a whisper, something might fracture in his chest or skull. "He would never forgive you if you interfered. I've already seen it happen once before. Please don't let me see it again."

The light turns in her gray eyes and he knows that she understands.

"Oh," she says, and somehow, impossibly, begins to laugh, as though he had said something worthy of hearing those soft sounds emerge from her thin, pale mouth. And after a minute, she puts her hands to her cheeks and wipes them quietly, though he doesn't know what he's done wrong.

"I'm sorry," he says, feeling helpless. "For hurting you. For always, somehow, finding a way to make you cry. Do you hate me now?"

And she puts her hand into her face and laughs through her tears and says, voice garbled, "I swear to the works of the good _Lord_, Teddy, but you may be driving me mad! How can you think that? How could I ever despise you? It'd be like hating my own heart, or throat, or chest or--"

"Bowels," he says, mouth twisting into a wry smile, and she laughs and cries all the harder. "I feel as though if I must be a part of you, it might as well be the least flattering part of all."

"I'm very much charmed by that silver tongue of yours," she manages between her tears, between bouts of incredulous, sad laughter. And then, finally, after wetting her sleeve and his coat's shoulder, she sighs and tries again.

"What will you do?" she asks, her lips barely trembling "What _can_ you do?"

"Nothing," he tries again, and his fingers are shaky as they run through his hair. "What would you have me do? He's an old man and-- I'm all he has left and... Jo, he's so _proud_ of me. I'm a failure and he's so _proud_ of me. I can't break his heart, not now, not while he's still-- with me. I need to..."

And he thinks of fathers and sons and grandsons and lineage, all the things he's been given, all that he's already learned.

"I can't break his heart like my father did," he finally says, feeling defeated. "No matter what else happens."

"You want to make him happy," she whispers, looking torn between pity and helpless love.

"Yes," he admits, and his lips twist up. "And that's what makes me a coward."

And then he sees that determined light flood into her eyes, her mouth turning into a thin, determined line, and remembers again, all too well, how much of that she's _not._

"And what will you do?" he asks, and his nerves tremble at her impending answer. "This is my life-- for years, maybe. This is who I am and what you'll have to put up with now. And will-- will you stay with me or-- will you--?"

"Don't you dare complete that sentence," she interrupts fiercely, and her voice trembles as her hands tremble as she reaches for his collar and pulls him into a kiss that rattles his bones, that sets fire to his blood, that has his fingers sink deep into her hips, holding her to him so quick as though he will never let go ever after.

He would never let go and neither would she. He thought he knew that by now, that finally he had learned from her arms blazing around him presently.

And when she pulls back, her eyes are steady and her lips are wet and she looks near close to slapping him again and he couldn't give a damn as long as he can always remain with her to the end.

"I'll set you free someday," she promises, and her fingers clutch too hard at his neck. "If you're locked in a cage, I'll smash it open someday. If you're Rapunzel, I'll be sure to climb up your tresses. If you're determined to be locked in your own misery, I'll keep you company. And when the time comes, when you don't need to make-- make yourself unhappy--"

He smiles, softly, slowly, a little impossibly, and touches the thin curve of her mouth.

"I believe you," he says. "I can't help _but_ to. When it comes to you, I have no doubts."

"Good," she replies, and smiles at him, brave, willing, red-eyed and lovely. "Because I'll set those wings of yours to flight one day, Teddy. And when that day comes..."

Her fingers slide against his wrists and she holds on so tight it nearly hurts.

He doesn't mind in the slightest.

"I'll be waiting for it," he promises, and means it.

And when she smiles at him, he knows that someday, in some way or another, they'll make it through to the end.

* * *

**Author's Note**: So, there's the first big crisis in Jo and Laurie's marriage and a sort of solution presented, though it'll take them more than a little time to implement it. Did you enjoy them breaking and making back up? Did you feel it was realistic? Do let me know! I don't want Jo and Laurie to be all sunshine and roses all the time but I don't want them to come off as unhappy with each other either!

And as always, I love and appreciate reviews. I'm almost 60% of my way to 100, something which continues to thrill me! And yes, I know... counting numbers isn't a good habit but... well... I imagine it's my OCD acting up again. ::smiles sheepishly::

Also, if anyone's interested... my friend **Captivated By the Sky** And I are co-writing a Newsies/Little Women crossover called **Falling Up** where Jo ends up in New York city and in the arms of a certain former newspaper peddler named Jack Kelly-- who coincidentally happens to look _exactly like Laurie._ (They were both played by Christian Bale in the movies!) If you're interested, feel free to look it up on either of our profiles. It's been a lot of fun to write and hopefully will be fun to read!


	10. Reconciliation

Ah, I haven't updated this series for quite a while! Oh, poor neglected series of mine... it's taking me much longer to finish it than I could have ever anticipated. (Damn graduate school... that's at the root of most of my problems.)

But in any case, thanks again to all the fabulous reviewers who have been keeping me hooked on writing this, especially my lovely friend **Idle Writer of Crack, **who tickled me pink by going on a reviewing streak and making me the happiest writer in all the fandom. And thanks again goes to **Dream's Sister** and **Elisabeth Harker **for helping me figure out how to write this very, very tricky part. You and all my other readers are angels, surely.

**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 10/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstances. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**

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* * *

****10. **

She is more of a puzzle than anything presented by a Theban Sphinx, more difficult and more rare. It's _work_ to love her, work to live with her, work to know that she is brilliant and he ought not be jealous of the other helpmates that she has. Yet, things are easier as well, with his confession and with her benediction, with the way they both strive hard to learn and look and understand.

And in any case, Jo gives him more than enough incentive to keep on working hard to keep her hand.

"I figure," she says one lazy afternoon on Sunday, in bed, "that if our marriage doesn't work out, I'll simply have to make sure Marmee never finds _out_. I'm assuming you'll be open to faking your own end?"

He looks up from the crook of her shoulder, still a little dazed from their connubial pleasures, a soft smile playing about still swollen lips. "You've got a very strange idea of pillow-talk, don't you, Jo? Whatever happened to romance?"

Her devious smile answers that question quite well. "I imagine I could get some _excellent_ fake blood from the theater that wants to adapt my new work. Oooh, the technicians can work wonders there! How comfortable are you with lying still for long periods of time, Teddy? And also, pretending to be stabbed?"

"Very," Laurie assures her solemnly, and then cleverly diverts her by once again pressing his lips to certain areas that could never be alluded to by pen.

It's hard work, sometimes, being with her—hard to keep in mind that she was wholly her own person and had her own mind, and that he could not simply command her to obey him as would almost any other man of his rank. It's hard to know that she was independent still and would damn well feel free to show her displeasure when she felt it, rather than coat it with passive aggression. And it's hardest yet to know that even when he tried to do his best to love her, she could be prickly and unsettled by his open fervor, though there were no obstacles yet between them.

Even after they've settled down a bit, there's more push-and-pull between them than between many magnets; more friction even than that. But with friction, as Jo would say, came heat—and he could never cease to marvel at the fact that she was a woman who would always stand her ground and speak her mind and always, almost always, _understand._

Eight months after they marry, he learns from a harmless-looking letter in his office mail that his grandfather is dead. He spends the rest of the day in more of a daze that usual, his eyes blank of knowledge and his mind in a haze, replaying the life he had spent loving and knowing and obeying and spiting the man who had most shaped him. The whole day, he signs his signature with more negligence than usual and can barely keep himself normal, the hollow reflection of the much better ancestor who had predeceased him.

He had never wanted the old man dead, not ever. Laurie had loved him at least as much as he had resented him, had thought him immortal and forever stable and capable of living on and on and on. His grandfather had been sick for the last few months, had been so gray he had barely been able to participate in the wedding, had coughed and looked so fragile the last time he and Jo had come to visit him in the wilds of Massachusetts. But he had never thought the old man capable of dying, not so easily. And although he had planned out the life he would lead after his grandfather's grip on him was over, he had not expected it soon. He knows himself now that he had never wanted it so soon.

He had not wanted the old man to die, not really, not even when his work made him feel miserable and inferior, and lash out even against the one he most loved.

He hadn't, but now the old man was, and Laurie couldn't help but feel that he had done something wrong, something he could not even speak of but that could never be repaired or repented, not ever.

When he comes home at his usual time in the late afternoon, Jo is there for him. She is walking down the stairs to greet him, her star-like eyes fixed on her papers, though her lips were curving up in welcome. "Teddy," she begins, "I've finished that accursed manuscript today! The publisher of my last one tells me he'd happily see it as well, as long as it doesn't raise any protests from the religious crowd. You know how those people get—"

She stops immediately when she sees his face: fear, mingled with sadness and repentance.

"Jo," he says, and it's all he can say for now. "Jo." Again and again, as though she and she alone were a balm for the holes he has burning in him.

She lets go of her papers immediately, and they fan around them both like a rain of swan-feathers; for a moment, all he can see is heather and haze. And then in another, she is in his arms, pulling him close and kissing his lips, holding him to her as though he were a second skin.

It feels like coming home after being in a far off war, weary and wounded and worn to death, but in a place where he is loved again.

"I've got you," she says and her voice is simple and rough and loving and fierce. "I've got you now and I am _not_ letting you go. I'm here for whatever has happened."

He puts his head on her strong shoulder and makes a thorough fool of himself on her skin.

She holds on anyhow, loving and fierce.

Later, in her arms and sprawled on their bed, he confesses as to why. His shame burns even through his genuine sorrow, but her hand remains in his for all of that. Even if the whole world had burned, he felt as though he could have remained anchored by as much: by her calm acceptance of what he had to say, by her refusal to give him deserved condemnation.

She should have. Any respectable woman would have, by the time he had gone from telling her that he would miss his grandfather, that he had loved the old man despite all his faults to telling that a part of him was glad of it, that he was free of all it, all of the expectations, all of the worries, all of the burning need to stand in for a son long since lost, to fall back in place where his father had strayed.

"I know he loved me," he says, knowing she will push him away any moment, almost hoping for it. "But my grandfather didn't even know me, did he? He always told me that I ought to be my own man, but he really meant me to be _his_ man. And I-- I never. I never _really_ stopped-- resenting him for that. I loved him but never... never as much as I should have."

She should have pushed him away in disgust. He wouldn't have begrudged her of that.

She holds on anyhow.

"You should hate me," he tells her, midway through, though his hands still clench knots into her dress. "You should-- should tell me to reform myself and-- and lecture me and make me your pupil and--"

Jo stops him with her look, her touch, her furious love, her complete lack of amazement. "Why? Do you think I'd feel any different in your place? Do you think I'd be any happier with what he had you do, any more glad? I'm no more a saint than you are, Teddy. I can hate just as much as I can love. And if I thought that-- or even if someone I loved had--"

Her fingers are like claws against his shoulder now, digging so deep in that he imagined she might well leave imprints.

He covers her hand with his and says, very gently, "What are you trying to say?"

"I don't give a damn about perfection," she replies through faintly white lips, "if you're also willing to let it hang."

He is. With her, he always has.

"He was a beautiful man," she whispers, once he has stopped shaking so against her. "I loved him almost as much as you did. I'll miss him as well. I wish he could have lived to have great-grand-children. But I don't want you to feel guilty about-- about wanting different things than he did for you. He loved you absolutely and completely but-- that didn't make it right, for him to cage you so."

"What are you saying?" he asks again, his voice soft and wondering, because he wanted-- needed-- to know.

"I'm telling you to bite the hand that feeds you," Jo said firmly. "If you want to. If you need to. If it's the one that's holding your leash as well."

It was. And it had already begun choking him half to death.

He had never wanted the old man dead, not ever. He had loved his grandfather with all his heart, all his soul, all the miserable pieces of him that had been left over from years of fighting and arguing and agitating with him, with trying to retain something of his romantic father and Italian mother from his grandfather's withering scorn.

But he wants to be free now, so, so desperately. And when he presses his face against her hair, it feels like the feathers of a thousand birds readying in flight, ready to take off if only he himself can.

"I love you," he says finally, when he can speak again. He knows he ought not to linger on it, that those words unsettled her whenever he pressed them against her-- only he was so tired and she was so warm next to him, so fierce and so loving and so true and so dear. Her fingers entwine with his and he kisses her hair, mute apology ringing in him.

He almost fears that she will move away at first, her Jo-ish disgust of sentiment taking over even her empathy for him. But instead, after taking a steadying breath, she merely draws her fingers lovingly down his curls and whispers, "I already knew that, Teddy. You married me, after all."

"But not how much," he says, almost recklessly, his eyes feverishly following her skin. "I've loved you at first sight and last sight and ever and ever sight. You're my only family now. You're all that I have still."

"No," she says, softly, looking a little shocked here when previously she had been so steady. "Teddy, I know you're-- you're going through a shock but I'm not your only support here! There's... there's my parents, of course, and all the rest of my family. There's John and Meg and Daisy and Demi and even Amy, really. The last time she wrote to me, she told me she hadn't imagined wringing that fine neck of yours for almost half a year!"

Impossibly, he laughed, even as tears sprang to his eyes and he pressed his face to her neck. And after, after she had finished soothing him again with soft noises and gentle murmurs against his skin, he sighed and tried to explain.

"Do you remember," he tells her softly, "the way I told Amy once that I was jealous of any man who belonged to the March family?"

"Yes," she responds slowly, her tongue dragging on the word, her teeth nipping her lower lip softly. "And... and I can understand why, of course. My family _is_ rather grand, isn't it? And Teddy..." The tenderness in her eyes might very well kill him, as she circles her fingers firmly against his shaking wrists. "I know you lost your own family in Italy. I know you wanted parents and a whole, grand extended family once more. And I'm happy to give it to you, dearest. You wouldn't be alone even if I wasn't here."

"Your family is grand," he says patiently, although she didn't yet understand. "And wonderful and forgiving and very, very kind to take me in even though I spent many, many months being an idiot about which of its daughters I'd rather marry. And yet..."

His fingers stroke her skin, her hair, her neck, the corners of the eyes that widened as the light of understanding began to dawn on them.

"Yet I wanted to be a part of the Marches because of _you_, Jo," he finally confesses, his eyes solemn. "And you're the main reason I longed for it! You, with your wildness and your ridiculousness and that enormous heart of yours-- you who would find some poor, lonely boy and draw him into your family, even if it were not proper! Do you suppose Meg or Beth or Amy would ever have let me in the way you did, without your pushing them first? And so how could I have loved any of them, even as wonderful as they are, without having previously having loved you best of all?"

He sees her face still momentarily, though she does not pull away, her fingers still absently running against his skin.

"I love you best," he whispers, "and even if my life had been different and I ended up with another March daughter, I would never have ceased feeling that. I know that you don't like... don't like romance or sentiment when it comes to being... the two of us but... but I felt, just this once, I had to say it. Now that I know how easy it is to lose someone. Now that I know I still can."

Another long moment, another still minute of silence. And then, just as he began to be deathly afraid of her pulling away, of him losing her just when he most needed it, he sees the tears spring to her eyes as she softly begins to laugh.

"What is it?" he asks finally, not sure whether to be happy or displeased at what's happened. "Jo, if I've upset you or said anything rash..."

"No!" she finally cries out, still chuckling to herself softly. "Just... just realizing how much of a complete ninny I've been over the last few years. That's it."

He has to smile slightly, although he is still puzzled by what she means. "A _complete_ ninny? That's a bit harsh, Jo, although I know you've had your awkward moments."

"A _complete_ ninny," she repeats firmly, her eyes very firm. "And-- and-- and we're both total fools, did you know that? Oh, Teddy, I'm so sorry to have made you feel as though you couldn't even tell me you loved me after all these months together-- which is only part of my ninnydom, really. The other part is that-- well, that a part of me honestly _didn't_ want you to say it. After all..."

And here she paused, his Jo. Jo, who had always been brave about almost anything but what reached into the heart of herself. Jo, who would ask the world of anything but what she wanted most.

"I thought you married me primarily because I could offer you family," she said, her mouth twisting slightly. "And also, frankly, because I wouldn't constrict you as much as Amy. So I... I didn't want you to lie to me about... about tender and lover-like things. Not after I was sure that-- that maybe you were trying to convince _yourself_ about how much you wanted me--"

"Jo--" he interrupted, almost angrily, more indignant on her behalf than she could ever be. "How could you even _think_ such-- such crazy--!"

"I told you I was a ninny," she said, simply, stopping him with a soft hand on his mouth. "And I love you too, my fellow ridiculous fool. Completely and absolutely. And now, as far as I can see, the one thing left in this O. Henry masterpiece. If you'll allow me a moment of whimsy...?"

Her hand is in his, and it's covered with even more calluses. She's never been ladylike, this wild wife of his, and he's never wanted her to be either.

"I allow away," he says, his heart blazing with tenderness and pain and warmth and silence, branded with the old man he had lost and the young woman who still stood with him. "Give me any words you want. I'll freely carry them."

"I'm yours," she said, and he could see the joy in her so clearly, "for just as long as I endure. And now that you're free from being a business drone finally, Teddy, are you going to tell those rude nincompoops off at the office yourself or may I come along?"

* * *

**Author's Note: **We're actually at the half-way point for this series so... ten more chapters and this will be done. Actually done! Although knowing my slow pace, it will still be a while... Still, following Jo and Laurie through all the rest of their life will be worth it, I hope. I especially can't wait until I get to follow them into old age. They'll be the most adorable little old couple ever, honestly!

And as always, reviews, comments and constructive criticism are *much* appreciated. I know I can't update my fics for the Little Women fandom as much as I used to, but that only makes me happier to receive feedback. Please do let me know if you're reading and enjoying this. 3


	11. Toward the Promised Land

In honor of the upcoming and delicious slaughter of turkeys my fellow Americans and I will be enjoying, I thought I should update a too-long-neglected series of mine. As always, thank you for reading and inspiring me in this fandom! And LIan, that is a truly blush-worthy comment. I am so glad you've enjoyed this series so much. ;)

**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 1/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstances. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**

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**11.**

He gives his notice in to work three weeks later, Jo cheerfully urging him on. His heart lighter than it had been since he had turned his back on the anarchic freedom of Lazy Laurence, he smiles warmly at the partners in the firm as he tells them that he'll come to work no longer, that they're welcome to buy his shares if they want, but given the lack of liquidity in the market, they'd probably be best off giving him an annual salary that could buy his non-interference from him in a most gentlemanly manner.

"I think I was actually a little disappointed to see the relief in their eyes," Laurie muses to his wife later. "I was hoping at least for a swooning fit."

"I'm sure you're exaggerating," Jo says, thumping him affectionately on the back. "They were probably catatonic with grief just then. Probably not a dry eye in the offices once you were gone, taking all the sunshine and kittens and rainbows and all such manner of wonders!"

He sighs sadly, and strokes his chin. "Oh yes, I can see it now. If only the firm of Laurence and Laurence had decided to write their ledgers in musical notes and not numbers! They'd be enjoying my golden, glorious company among themselves even now."

But they aren't and after a while, he can't imagine himself with them again, with the burden of pretending to be productive in a profession he hated once more hanging over his head like a careerist version of the Sword of Damocles. And without that sword-- and admittedly, the immense financial security that came with it-- they learn to economize between themselves, and he has to admit that he has to try harder than she does. She's always been flinty and sharp, his Jo, and living first with her genteelly poor family and then on her own had long enrolled her in the school of hard-knocks. If anything, _he_ was always the one on the verge of impracticality, a youth of luxury and ease making him reflexively seek out the simple and costly solutions to everything, without thinking it all out.

They fight about money at first, sometimes playfully and sometimes a little more cruelly, sometimes in a way that resolves easily and sometimes in ways that make him want to walk out of their cozy home and back into the office, ready to take back up everything he has given up for (as he sometimes manages to convince himself, when angry enough) her. But he never does, even in his tantrums, and when he comes home sheepish at his own stupidity, she's always at the steps waiting for him, waiting for him to make things up for her.

Luckily, he's _very_ good at that part.

At first, he's unsure of what he _should_ do, now that he's gotten away from the corporate hall of mirrors. It's all well and good to think of himself as an artist at last, free to write the operas that he wants, free to spread beauty throughout the world. But as always, he should have counted on Jo to swing to his rescue at the last minute, completely missing out on it as she does so-- or at least, giving that impression willingly.

"I hate all those nit-witted women on stage right now!" she declares passionately one night after they arrive home from the cheap seats of a play, as he watched her heave with interest. "Whatever minute spark of personality they might have-- which could already be exceeded by a slow-witted orangutan-- dies in them as soon as they bundle off to get married! By God, Teddy, we could do so much better! We'll show them all how to make a heroine who doesn't keel over as soon as she slides a wedding ring on!"

He lifts an eyebrow and she smiles sheepishly and adds, "And I'd really like it if you could help me write a few songs. It'd be even better as a musical, you know."

Seeing as how she's got all the musical ability of a cockatoo with its vocal chords surgically removed, it's fair enough.

For a while, he thinks that working together might well kill them both off. He's always known that Jo's dedicated to her art but he had no idea she could transform into _his_ artistic drill-sergeant, given enough ammunition to be. Seized with creative longings, she's like Athena crossed with Napoleon Bonaparte, gleefully burning whatever distractions lay in her path in order to reach the promised land of fulfilling creative fantasies. And though it's a process he's envied for many a year as he watched her at it, it's not an easy one for him to adapt to, as she all but forces him to keep up with her as she leaps from scene to theatrical scene.

"You and me," he says one day, in despair over how slowly he composed to how quickly she wrote, "we're getting close to being done professionally, aren't we?"

"I'm quite adamantly refusing to believe that," she answers bullishly, before yanking his sheets of music right out of his hand. "And will it help in the least if I try and pencil in a few needed lyrics? Let's collaborate, Teddy. Let's _wheel_ and _deal._"

"Fine," he replies, although beneath his exasperation lurks the hint of a smile. "Those were always the hardest parts of trying to finish my opera for me."

"You never were any good at plot," she scoffs, and waives one airy hand while another gets to work. "Let Doctor Jo prescribe her medicine for that mendicant!"

"Fine," he says, and tugs her own script from her hands. "As long as you let _me_ revise that play of yours. You're brilliant, Jo, but your men don't sound like men at all. Nobody with the appropriate packaging down below makes quite as many flowery speeches as that!"

Bizarrely enough, once they get past the initial longing to throttle one other, their partnership works quite well. He ends up having to try and keep up and occasionally correct some of her crazier ideas about men, maidens and maniacs through the course, but at the very least, it leads him to take quite a few chances on notation he never would have attempted before. His old musical tutors would have scoffed at his attempts at trying to swerve from classical traditions but with Jo, he thinks he may as well go off the beaten path.

Something about Jo always makes him want to take a chance.

"Is that a bad thing?" she asks, forehead crinkling when he says as much as they near completion at last.

"What on earth," he replies smiling as he edits dialog with half-shut eyes, "would you think that?"

Their first show isn't much of a smashing success, but it's enough to get produced by a few good friends in a small theater, and bring them a tidy little sum. And it's more than enough inspiration to write others, to work hard and turn out both theatricals for others and for themselves, to slip in and out of different characters. They create and try on different selves as easily as the teenagers they once were, and any given afternoon can find inhabiting the skin of monster, mad-man, mermaid or muse before Laurie sits down to his grand piano to figure out the proper tunes. They're are a thousand, a hundred, a dozen and themselves: Jo and Teddy, Laurence and Laurie, a young couple taking on the world with one work of art at a time, on their way to some creative promised land.

"We're going to change the world someday," she tells him, face bright and full of fervor. "We'll change something about the theater, whether the people running it like it or not! No, no, we'll do one better. If we're good enough and can write something well, we might even inspire someone to change for the better eventually!"

The work is harder than he had ever thought it was, the people even more penny-pinching and severe. The days are long, the hours strange, and the company-- both when it's merely her and when it's others-- is eccentric beyond all means. There is none of the serenity and comfort offered from his late grandfather's quarters, no knowledge that he is insulated from his own failures through the interventions of more intelligent men.

He stands on his own two feet now, just himself with her as his best help. He's his grandfather's image no longer.

"I imagine," he says finally, and smiles at his wife with shining eyes, "that you can say you've already accomplished that."

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**Author's Note: **Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! I'll update this Christmas during the school holidays, and that'll be it for this year. Here's to having 2009 slowly come to a close.


	12. A Lesson in Fencing

I haven't updated in much too long... I blame finals week, my recent wedding anniversary and (admittedly) a slackening of my interest in the fandom. I hate to admit it but a few weeks ago, I ran across a fic where Laurie spent some time tutting over Jo pining over him and being all merry with his new wife Amy and... oooh, I must admit, it soured him in my eyes! Ridiculous but there you go. I don't feel much like writing him anymore after reading that fic and feeling as though poor Jo was ill-used by him. But I'm still determined to finish this series before I leave the fandom, and to put up a few other things that I've already written.

So in any case, here's part 12 of 20 Different Ways, specifically written for Emerald. She wanted Jo and Laurie and a lesson on fencing... and so she shall have it!

**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 12/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstances. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**

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**12.**

One day in gay July, he finally gives in to her burning desire to learn how to fence, especially after she spends a whole week asking in tones of increasing sadness, claiming it would be just what she'd need to get into the mind-set of her newest paper prince. It's a lesson that he's long denied her primarily out of fear for both their life and limbs, no matter how much she's begged before. But Jo, being the tricky minx that she is, has somehow brought forth a duel between rival princes and so, one strange day, Laurie finds himself standing between for with naught but a foil between them, praying for mercy from the Lord.

"Before we begin," Laurie says with a great deal less chivalry than usual, "I have to warn you that if you make a eunuch out of me, I may never forgive you."

She pouts at him in a way that would have been alluring were she not on the verge of possibly unmanning him. "Even if I give you a harem to guard afterward in repayment?"

"I've already got all the women I can handle," he returns. "And also, if I _was_ a eunuch, much of the pleasure of vexing you so would sadly be gone."

She narrows her eyes slightly and suddenly, Laurie learns the true meaning fear all over.

"We'll see about that," she mutters, and then, shouts: "Eng arte!" And then he's forced to use every ounce of athleticism in him to fend her off and not run screaming from her like an enormous coward.

It's actually a little awe-inspiring to see how much havoc Hurricane Jo can wreck in a matter of mere moments, with himself only hanging on to his limbs by the skin of his teeth. Even so, after a few minutes of her chestnut wrath, he decides that prudence may well be the best part of valor.

"Stand and fight like a man!" she roars, and throws herself about like a deadly windmill form the mouth of Hades.

"No thank you!" he returns, ducking his head to avoid having it smashed against the wall. "I'm perfectly happy to run like a coward! I actually find it quite freeing!"

"I've always enjoyed that sunny attitude of yours," she cackles, and then lunges fatally at him.

After it's over, she's sprawled on top of him in a way he would have appreciated if his kidneys hadn't been threatening to liberate themselves from his skin. He's quite sure he's got bruises on top of his bruises, although at least he's kept her from injuring herself.

"Christopher Columbus," Jo sighs, and looks horrified. "Did I hurt you _that_ much here?"

"Ow, ow, ow," he piteously replies, which causes Jo to look at her hands with absolute horror, as though they had been registered as deadly weapons without her keen eye upon them.

"Oh Teddy!" she wails, "I will never used my newly discovered strength on you again! I've turned into nothing more than a common domestic abuser! Oh, I had no idea you were so fragile! I shall never again hurt you so!"

"Ow, ow, ow," he mutters in a more rebellious tone, although now it's his ego that smarts the most.

"What can I do to help?" she wails louder, her eyes going wet with guilt. "I'll do anything for you, dearest, anything you please! Anything to take away the hurt!"

"Ow, ow, ow-- kay," he says, at last, and pulls her down to claim her tempting mouth.

She _had_ said anything, after all.

And so dedicated are they to their art that he's more than happy to continue play-acting villain to her royal being, albeit in a far less orthodox manner.

After it all was said and done, Jo lays her dreamy head on his collar-bone and sighs happily, though a little suspicion tingled even in her most satisfied tone. "And just how long, Teddy, were you holding _that_ back on me?"

"Until I could be quite sure you weren't going to shriek and run from it," he admits with commendable honestly, and grins as he watches her extend an amused eyebrow up. "What is it now, my darling skeptic? Still haven't placed your trust in me?"

"I trust you about as far as I can comfortably spit a camel. But..." And here, that smile of hers that he had always been partial to plays sweetly upon her lips. "This does indeed seem like a very... fascinating new way of brain-storming... though I imagine the character revelations we just came up can't be projected onto a stage fully."

"Not unless we want the censors to _really_ come after us," he adds thoughtfully. "Although controversy _does_ sell quite well..."

"So," she murmurs, and by now, even the bruises on top of his bruises seem to pleasurably tingle under her vixenish touch. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"That we'll have to do this more often?" he asks, drawing his finger down her glistening bare back. "Very often and most exhaustively?"

Jo angles a plaintive look at him, as though she's truly sorry. "Well, I _do_ hate to burden you so, Teddy. Only wouldn't it be fascinating to see how the Prince Pomfrey reacts to being propositioned by the Queen Cuticles after he gets engaged to her own daughter?"

"...You really need to work on those names, Jo. In fact, you should never name any character, ever. Not even our children, when we have them. Really, leave all that to me."

"Are you with me or not?" she asks, her fingers ghosting up and down his stomach in that way she knew he loved, the tricky little minx. "Because if not, we can always go back to working quite separately..."

"Anything for my art," he declares grandly, and sweeps her up into his arms and off to their boudoir to hash out their story lines again.

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**Author's Note: **Happy New Years, everyone! Over the next few months, I'm going to try and update on a weekly basis, until all of the fics I've already written for the fandom are up. Getting reviews is very nice and helps me fight off my apathy about not putting up anything. ;)


	13. Generation

At last-- the children come about! It took longer than I expected to get to this point but I hope my readers enjoyed the journey along the way!

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**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 13/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstances. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**

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**13.**

When Jo is round with child for the first time four years into their marriage, his world begins and ends by her body's side, by her increasingly expanding edges. He spends hours by her side, his hand curved around the press of her burden as they imagine futures and princes and princesses and promises, fairy tales spun from his hand in hers. He holds her close as her body swells and her breasts ache, and promises her that she could do anything she wants to after the birth to repay her for her current condition. When she promises him that it shall be painful, he smiles and invites her forward.

"It will be _terrible_," she announces to him with bloody satisfaction. "Terrible and horribly disfiguring as well! You will howl for mercy even more than I will on the birthing bed, Teddy! Howl like a werewolf with a head-cold!"

"Oh, I don't know," he tells her cheerfully. "I can imagine myself howling enough to appear non-human but enough to out-do _your_ adorable little yelps? Now that would be reaching for another sound barrier altogether."

It turned out Jo's aim was just as good while carrying a child as while not. Laurie ends up howling for a bit after all but it's worth it to hear her happily cackle again.

Weeks and months pass lazily, with Jo's usual prickly warmth shading more and more into worry as her waist slowly disappears. Laurie is content on his part-- if nothing else, the thought of the havoc that their child could wreak rather made him smile, even as he winced at the thought of expensive collateral damage as well. But Jo is Jo and though he will never know why, she carries doubt with her the way other women carry clouds of perfume and laudanum.

One pale night, with her burden so large it took up half their bed by itself, she presses her swollen face to the blankets and asks: "How can you be sure I'll be a good mother?"

Laurie reaches out to take her hand in his own and asks, "How can you be sure I'll be a good father?"

Jo makes a noise at the back of her throat, as though it never occurred to her. "Well, I suppose it's because I trust you and I know that between the two of us, you're probably a little more sensible."

He stares. "Are you sure? Are you really and truly sure? If anything, you should fear more about how my parenting shall warp our poor little boy or girl! I'm many things, Jo, but I'm no role model. Look at what I did the first time around when you refused me!"

She doesn't look convinced and simply sighs. "I trust you," she explains softly. "But I—I never even spent much time thinking I'd be a mother one day and now that it's nearly happening—"

"You'll be brilliant," he promises her fiercely, and the noise she makes against his throat in response is both a sob and a laugh, everything mingling in her freely.

He wants, at first, to go back to work in his grandfather's offices, no matter how much his vitals rebel against it. He is a child no longer and he cannot pretend to be, now when he knows he will need to support his own children. He and Jo could live in perfect ease without diamonds and carriages and dinner parties and mansions—but his children, they need the best.

And he would have gone back for the sake of his impending child—he would have. He would have sacrificed nearly anything he had. Only Jo stops him with a single press of her clumsy but gentle hand on his hip, the other one supporting her own back. She could have broken his heart with the picture she had made: the wife he loves, with the child they have made still growing within her, alight with a singular passion.

"Don't go back," she says. "It'll kill you. Physically or spiritually or mentally or emotionally—it'll kill you in the end. Sell what you need to and keep a few interests for a small annual salary—we can do very well with that. We'll live simply and I'll write my stories and you'll have your compositions, and we'll manage on that. As long as we've enough to love them and keep them comfortable and send a few off to college, what else do we need? I won't have you sacrifice yourself for the sake of making our children soft, placid, spoiled and entitled. We can do better that that."

This is how she does things, his Jo. Everything she can for everything she loves, with everything within her that she has.

"Well," he says, and his eyes are shining and his knees are trembling and his heart is like a bird set free from a cage it had held too far long within. "If… if you promise never to complain about not having another golden flower for the pretty curls upon your head…"

She throws her head back and laughs. "Teddy, at what point did you hit your head hard enough to take me for a social climber?" And though she now carries an extra twenty pounds within her tall frame, her feet somehow manage not to touch the ground when he picks her up for a victory dance.

When her labor begins, their first child comes quickly, as though loath to spend another moment in her mother's womb while a brand new world beckoned. Her cries are piercing and her hair is dark and wispy, and he bends down to kiss her fragile little crown and take the scent of a newborn in. His daughter is lovely and luminous and liberatingly loud already, every bit of her marked by their mutual lineage.

"I worry," Jo begins, and she is pale and exhausted and sweat-slicked and still soiled and beautiful for all of that. "I worry that this one, our little Eliza Bethy, will be too much like me. I worry that she'll inherit too many deficits from me. I worry that she'll eventually be—be-- just as fool-hardy--"

He leans across her birth-bed to kiss her and this is how their child touches the both of them for the first time: between a collision course of intent kisses, her father laughing against her mother's hair.

"No," he replies, wondrous, smiling. "Don't you dare say _worry_. Say that you hope instead."

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**Author's Note: **As always, reviews are much appreciated! And I promise, I shall never, ever get overly sentimental about Jo and Laurie's children. Adorable they may be but... they're still a blend of Jo and Laurie. As you can imagine, trouble is never very far from them. ;)


	14. The Family Tree

100 reviews! _This story just reached over 100 reviews! _How amazing is that?!

And in thanks, I give you all this chapter... though I have to admit I found it somewhat agonizing to write, since I find Original Character children to be rather irritatingly twee when they show up in fanfic. But it's the nature of the beast that if you write about two people who live Happily Ever After, you must read about their offspring. So I've done my best to deal with the result without making them into horribly saccharine little moppets. Here's hoping that their antics come out to be at least a *little* entertaining!

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**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 14/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstances. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**

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**14. **

They have three little ones in the space of five years, two with Laurie's hair, two with Jo's clumsy hands, one with his father's musical talents and two regrettably very much without-- albeit still being stubborn in finding it. For a little over two decades, their house rings with laughter and the sounds of growing children, their eldest daughter blithe and brave, their only son sincere and sensitive, and their youngest daughter mischievous enough that even a mansion full of nannies might not be enough to contain her bursts of temperament.

Given that they _are_ the result of his loins and her toiling, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that their children, sweet as they are, often set new heights in madness. And yet, every time he and Jo come back to home and heart from a hard day's work, only to find the place figuratively (and once, literally) set on fire, it still manages to surprise them.

One day, a decade-and-a-half into marital harmony, they sit together on their front steps and stare at the kitchen of their grand old house, which had seen far better days. Their faces are as long as the day in the summer, and it takes him quite a while before he can bring himself to nudge the shell-shocked beloved beside him.

"Is it just me," he says, when he finally feels capable of speech, "or did our tiny darlings fully inherit our lunacy? Though the scope of what just happened is... almost inspiring. Even for them."

She nudges back, tilting her head against his shoulder slightly. "I'd be proud if I wasn't so busy thinking of horrible punishments from the Middle Ages. And what do you mean by _our_ lunacy, dearest?"

Even past his immense annoyance, he has to laugh. "Oh, forgive me. I keep forgetting that in our past years, you were the very model of circumspection."

She nudges again, smiling softly, and it's enough to make his heart lift a little in his furious chest. "Oh, certainly. I know _I_ certainly never got up to scrapes this terrible, which means that this must be part of _your_ inheritance."

He decides not to mention several cooking experiments of years past and smiles. "Then it's only logical to conclude the pyromania was part of the Laurence legacy to them?"

Her head topples onto his shoulder, heavy and reassuring. "And don't you forget it. Incidentally, which one of our trouble-makers started it?"

"Certainly not James," he murmurs, mulling over the possibilities. "I think he was almost traumatized over the sheer _mess_ after we managed to drag him away from it."

"I still think he might be a changeling," Jo murmurs just as affectionately against his shoulder. "That or he was switched at birth with one of Amy's children."

"He does sort of have the soul of a brooding artiste mingled with that of an accountant, doesn't he?" Laurie mused.

"Hah. Now _that_ is a combination for the ages!"

"But it makes sense," he says, letting a familiar and warm skirmish with Jo at least temporarily lighten his mood. "I mean, think about it. There's Amy's perfectionism on your side and my grandfather's, well, perfectionism on mine. Put those together, germinate between our loins in one night of unforgettable passion--"

"...You can still remember the exact circumstances he was brought to this world in?"

"No, and now you've broken my flow. As I was saying, put those together, germinate between our loins in what I'm almost sure is one night of very real, if forgettable, passion, allow to grow within you for nine months and a little more and... voila! The perfect combination of your sister and my grandfather emerges."

"That," he wife says, shooting him a look caught between amusement and amazement, "is a visual I could have lived my whole life without needing to ponder on."

He smiles and throws an arm around her. "I do love providing you with teachable moments, pet. But then, I think that might be my grandfather peeking through again."

Jo nudges him in the shoulder. "In any case, I _truly_ doubt it would be James! God bless but he'd never put up with so much a mess. Who then? Lizzy or Annie? Annie or Lizzie! It must be one if not both that got up to this mischief!"

It's a good question to ask and an even more difficult one to answer. Lizzy did have a certain tendency to act first and think later, and might well have started off a minor conflagration in her efforts never to be shown up by a younger member of her family, she managing the role of eldest child with a jealous fervor. But Annie wasn't exactly a paragon of stability either and in her more artistic moods, could certainly have thought herself capable of corralling fire...

Jo looks at him as he thinks it over and smiles the sort of smile that would send terror into the hearts of children the world over.

"Are you now thinking what I'm thinking?"

The smile he gives as an answer to that is not particularly civilized either. "Finding incredibly painful yet subtle methods of retribution for our sweet darlings until they give the culprit up and learn not to make their own meals without heavy adult supervision?"

He rather likes her resulting cackle, though he knows that the children would tremble with fear to hear it. "Oh, Mister Laurence, how dearly do I enjoy the fruits of your imagination!"

"Good," he says briskly, and then helps her to her feet so that they can strive forward as twin juggernauts of judgment and fury. "Let's just hope the fruits of our loins survive it!"

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**Author's Note: **As always, reviews are much appreciated! Also, I can't lie... Anne pretty much *is* the same as the one from Green Gables and James is possibly the only sane one in the entire family. I just hope they didn't come off as being too horribly _cutesy_. Laurie and Amy's daughter "Bess" in the original universe was already enough of a tooth-ache to read!

Additionally although I have not been updating so much as of late, I promise you that I'll put up something ***special*** during this April's Fool day... Think of this as a giant, giant thank-you to all my readers who have given me _over 100 reviews _for this series. Thank you so much for helping me reach this milestone!


	15. Falling From the Nest

This part is going to be terribly short but to be honest, my brain has a tendency to freeze up when I write OC characters. Thus, the stage-left exit of Laurie and Jo's kids whizzed by rather quickly in my head. Here's to hoping this chapter is at least a fun parting for them!

* * *

**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 15/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstances. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**

* * *

**15.**

He misses them fiercely when they begin to leave home, his brilliant and wonderfully inventive little blossoms and birds. In enough time, they fly to all the corners of the world by and by, to marry and teach and doctor and study, to nurse the world's ailments as best as they all can. All the children are miracle-workers in their own way, blessings to the earth once they had managed to have the pyromania tricked out of them.

Yet for all their blessings, he remains melancholy when they begin to leave and leave a king bereft of kingdom. He misses the way his Eliza used to pound on the piano while Anne had wailed beside her and poor James had suffered fits from being the only one with a proper musical temperament. He misses Eliza's strange conjectures on the science of psychology, and Anne's rebuttals that all too often came in the language of philosophy that drive her sister mad. He misses Anne's constant cries for rights and suffrage, and James's hapless sighs over being the sole sane one in a house full of mad men and women. He misses the way they talk and speak and laugh and even breathe, and the way they would all wait for him past their bed-time when they had been simply children.

It gives him, if nothing else, more insight into his grandfather's mind than he has ever expected. And just as his grand-sire did, he sits in melancholy for almost a week straight-- broken only by Jo's intervention, by that magic way of hers that could so easily turn even his worst thoughts on their head.

In retrospect, he probably should have seen it coming-- but as always, she manages to surprise him.

"I believe," Jo says sweetly one night, even as she slides between the crisp, warm sheets of their bed, "that having a nest empty of our little fledglings does have certain compensations."

If his mind was capable of working more quickly, he would have realized even then her plans. But instead, he simply stirs restlessly amidst the sticky summer night and sighs at the thought of their youth flying past them. "Hmmm, really? How so? I can't even begin to imagine."

Although it becomes considerably easier to do so when his wife finally makes her move, pulling aside the sheets to straddle him while fluidly bringing her arms about his wrists to pin them just above him. She smiles in a terribly unwholesome manner, and his breath whistles through his teeth in much the way it had when she had pressed herself to his flesh.

"Don't you remember," she says rather wickedly, "what I got to learn from the Moulin Rouge? It's been many a year but I've retained it well."

Oh, he thinks, as one dexterous hand slides against his still covered thigh. _Oh!_

"Christopher Columbus--" he manages to moan, before she silences him with a reminder again.

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**Author's Note: **As always, reviews are much appreciated!

And hmm... I must admit, that chapter was so short it rather dissatisfied me but I can't be bothered to make myself fuss with it. However, chapter 16 (which will be posted the week AFTER my April's Fools surprise!) is really rather fun, with Jo and Laurie being surprisingly bad-ass for people now in their _fifties. _I hope you're looking forward to it! ;)


	16. One Last Trip West

Sigh. I think it's time to acknowledge that I tend to be bloody horrible at keeping promises. I made myself a solemn one that I would put up April's Fools fic this year but that promise pretty much died away when I went away from home for Spring Break and had no internet access whatsoever. And now putting up Little Women parody fic just seems... anti-climactic.

Well, I can always post it over the summer. In any case, here's the next chapter of 20 Different Ways-- and the last one that's unequivocally happy. As always, thank you for reading and I do hope you enjoy this!

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**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 16/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstances. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**

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**16. **

One day, after almost thirty odd years of being married, they wake up to realize that somehow, they were far wealthier than they had ever previously been.

It's a realization that takes them over with not a little shock, given how used they've gotten to scrimping to make ends meet in a house-hold full of three _very_ exuberant children. They had done well enough for themselves overall, though Jo never had the chance to run about with diamond slippers in her youth and the children hadn't drowned in the lap of luxury during their formative years. Still, they had lived comfortably and there had never been a lack of love or theatrics or book learning among the Laurences, no matter how Anne would occasionally stagger about, complaining about the lack of dark-haired and ridiculously handsome aristocratic men about them.

("Did she over-look _you_ somehow?" Jo had exclaimed at the time, flabbergasted. "Teddy, you're all of that and so much more!" And if Anne hadn't still been pretending at a swooning fit, Laurie might have well leaped at her mother just then.)

They had done well for themselves over the years, to the point where a new Laurence and Laurence production was all but expected in theaters come every other spring. They work steadily and productively and occasionally profitably and during his later days, Laurie would not have said he was anywhere near dissatisfied, despite the modesty of his financial fortune.

And yet, when artistic immortality and financial success finally comes upon them, it all rests on a slender volume of words that Jo writes and he edits-- and that somehow becomes a story of extraordinary success, much to Jo's mortification and his howling amusement.

After all, though it might have been Jo's brilliant idea to immortalize the story of her family, childhood and later years, he had most definitely been a demanding reader and helper, poking and prodding her every which way to put in episodes she only dimly remembered and coincidentally, made a certain fictional neighbor of the equally fictional 'May family' look terribly gallant. Thus, given all that, he happily takes credit for part of her success-- and feels entitled to grin at her during their morning tea when the mail man drops off bushels of fan letters calling for wedding bells to ring between the boyish yet brilliant 'Lou' and the neighbor next door who had pined for her for ages on end.

"I expect it's all those descriptions of his rapturous masculine grace and beauty," he tells her knowingly as she seethes, as though he had not all but penciled them in himself. "That 'Dorie' next door _does_ come off like a charmer, doesn't he? Oh, it'd be a hard-hearted woman indeed who could resist him!"

"Keep this up," she snorts back, "and I'll have 'Dorie' move to Paris permanently and contract terrible diseases mortal man has not even dreamed of yet!"

He has to fight back a smile. "Oh yes, that will play well with your young audience."

She frowns for a minute and he thinks he almost has her, before she smiles slyly back. "Well, even if I can't do that-- who's to say he'll win Lou over at the end anyway? Maybe she'll meet someone distinguished and only half as peckish as him in the big city she flees to after she thwarts his attempt at her hand!"

"This new man might be half as peckish," he tells her dryly, "but also probably only half as pretty and charming. And all the little girls reading your narrative might well ambush you on our front steps to protest such an act!"

"I'll throw the original boy-next-door at them to keep them busy," she announces rather wickedly, with a gleam in her eyes he much distrusts. "And why can't Dorie go off and meet another pretty May sister in Paris? I bet he could be _quite_ charmed by her new elegance... and reformed in the bargain."

Genuinely appalled, he stares at her. "Oh, Jo, you wouldn't!"

She smiles and it's a rather terrifying sight. "Oh, wouldn't I? I do like surprising my readers once in a while, Laurie. No author wants to be thought of as predictable, you know that."

"Think of all the hearts you'll break," he pleads with her quite sadly. "Including yours, once all of those young girls see what you've done. They'll likely flood us both with letters, Jo! We'll be flooded in and have to adapt to a terrible new reality where we're pelted at by rotten fruit thrown from the hands of disappointed school children!"

That, at least, is enough to make Jo pause and stare uncertainly down at the enormous stack of paper already collecting in front of her. Some of them _had_ been terribly passionate.

"Do you really think that they'd be _that_ aroused to anger?"

"I think," he announces sadly, "that it would be very undignified to live up to the ripe old age of six-and-fifty and then die from asphyxiating on the papery indignation of a thousand outraged young ladies who have seen a beloved couple end up with far more boring spouses. Think of the adventures lost, Jo! Surely you wouldn't resign dear Lou and Dorie to lives as bled-out as that?"

"I hate to admit it," she finally declares after a minute of solemn contemplation, "but that _is_ a good point to have."

"Then may they live long and happy fictional lives," he says gaily, and takes her rough hand in his own. "Though I admit, I do find it difficult to think even _they_ can be quite as lucky as we've been. What will you plan for them next?"

"Let's get back to work," Jo says brightly, lifting her cup again to her lips. "And then we'll figure it out after that."

"Wonderful idea," he tells her cheerfully. And then, almost as though it were nothing: "And would capitalizing on our built-in audience with a new musical and a line of dolls based on the May sisters also be out of hand?"

Jo ends up almost choking to death on her beverage, but seeing as how they end up richer than Croesus thanks to the magic of cross-promotion, even she admits that the surprise is worth it afterward.

However, even this leaves them one last confounding question.

"What are we going to do with all this filthy lucre?" Jo asks a few busy years later, after all their plans for the Tiny Women series had been cashed in. (As Laurie liked to say, you could take the man out of business but never the business out of man. Apparently, he had a gift for promotional tie-in merchandising that had made them once again ludicrously rich.) "I am all for throwing great wads of it in the bathtub and rolling around smelling the rich, fresh-printed glory but at some point, we might actually want to _do_ something with it."

He cocks his head, thinking hard. "Well, there are the children and grand-babies and they could always use the help. Although Annie and her Gilbert might well shriek if they thought we were trying to lure them back to civilization."

Jo grins wryly at him. "Should I ask them if they shall ever be back from medicining unwilling participants abroad or simply mail away wads of money and hope for the best?"

"Probably the latter," Laurie murmurs, and then thoughtfully grins.

"You know," he goes on, rather brightly, "as the editor of these highly successful volumes, I do feel I've done my part in helping you on your quest for literary glory. Shall I get something in turn from Josephinland?"

She looks up from her almanac, and looks intrigued. "I don't know why you can't."

"Then," he begins carefully, as she starts grinning, "I would consider myself very well repaid if you could take this old husband of yours on one last adventure, over sea, shore and land."

And when she folds her hands in her lap and stares at him with the fire of challenge in her eyes, he knows he's once again won this hand.

"A difficult request, I see... but not impossible. A heap of treasure might well be divested toward worse ends!"

And like any fairy godmother might, she proudly whisks him off to Egypt as a way of saying thanks. They spent their thirty-eighth wedding anniversary scaring camels, disquieting locals, and scandalizing their more proper children by chasing each other through ancient and majestic sands.

When they get back home, they are sun-burnt and enamored of foreign cuisine and able to merrily yell at one another with an exotic tongue and tone that they have carried back. Their first night back in New York seems almost startlingly quiet and staid in comparison, and Laurie finds himself looking pensively at his wife as they curl up beside one another in their comfortable old bed.

"Do you ever regret," he asks her curiously, "the life that you've had? You could have probably gone on far more journeys of that sort if you hadn't always had to worry about child-bearing and a bride-bed."

"Don't be ridiculous," she says to him warmly, just enough laughter in it to be her and no other. "I know it's old hat to you by this point but that's a truly absurd thing to say. Of everything I've done and everything I could lived through..."

And when her fingers find his in the darkness, his old heart somehow manages to leap out of his breast.

"Being with you," she laughs softly, "has always been the best adventure that I could have ever had."

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**Author's Note: **As always, reviews are much appreciated!

And believe me-- once this summer rolls around, I *will* finish this series and take it to its logical end! Just four more chapters, albeit ones filled with a measure of heart-break. Just four more and then we're home free...


	17. Last Night, I Thought I Dreamed Again

I didn't update this series for a bit because, frankly speaking, the next few segments of it hurt my hurt (and give me massive writer's block!) Still, I do hope you enjoy this next part and see it as the logical next step for Jo and Laurie as they age together and face the last few years of their happily ever after...

**Title: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet, Part 17/20  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: 20 Different Ways to Leap Through the Minuet  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Cast  
Rating: R for allusions to sexual content  
Summary: He has always know that she would be his downfall one of these days; he simply hadn't understood how deeply strange would be the attending circumstances. 20 different looks into Jo, Laurie, and the marriage that could have been.**

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**17. **

The end begins with almost imperceptible signals, with a shortness of breath, with a burning of the lungs, with the very briefest tremors in a hand.

They grow old, they grow old, they grow gray and their skin folds over within the midst of even more tired flesh. His hair thins and his jowls sags and his knees ache and his joints hurt; her hair grays and her smile wrinkles and her wrists smart and her lips thin further; but as long as they've got each other, it isn't so terrible after the fact. He finds aging to be an indignity at best and a tragedy at worst but when Jo is about to tease him abominably about his vanity, he thinks he can bear it after all.

"Look at you," she says, and her hair is as gray as the moonlight in his loving hands. "So vain after almost forty years of marriage to me! I knew I should have beat you more when I still had the strength in my hands."

"All good things come to an end," he tells her lightly, before ducking down to kiss her brow as they curl up by the fire on their comfortable old couch, the one he had brought her so many years ago as a wedding present. "Although if it helps, your tongue is still as sharp as ever. Want to lash me with it for a bit, dearest?"

"Oh but of course!" she murmurs wickedly. "When you give me open invitation, I can't help but to resist taking advantage!" And she then insults his hair, his musculature and his intellect in that order as he laughs and laughs and laughs.

Things end around them, slowly but surely, even as they endure them yet. Jo's parents, well-loved and forever kind-hearted, pass through their years together before fading away peacefully in their own bed. Amy lies ill in England and they cannot visit her, although they know she is well-loved by the large family she and her Fred have made there. John dies gently surrounded by his kin when he nears the age of sixty, from a patient but persistent murmur of the heart that had dogged him for years past. Meg joins him just a few seasons after, the only one Jo and Laurie could see before the inevitable end.

"Don't worry about me," Meg had whispered, her fingers drawing up in both their hands. "I'll be with John and Beth and Marmee and Father and... oh Jo, please don't cry so. I'll be very happy, I promise you! Please don't feel so upset."

And Jo had managed a rough smile through her tears and said, "Oh, don't be ridiculous, I'm only unhappy I can't see all of you there myself! Really, Meg, I'm being jealous right now. This is just me in a right proper snit."

Meg had smiled sadly, knowing her sister, and died peacefully not three hours past.

He would always remember the sight of Jo's pained eyes as she heard the news, time and time again. She had never wanted to lose her loved ones, no more than he himself had. And no matter how much time she had had to say goodbye, she would always curl up beside him in their bed afterwards, weeping as though it were Beth again, sudden and terrible and tragic and unexpected, and she could not bear the experience.

He can't help but wonder what will happen when his own time comes, as it draws inevitably past. He is so sure that he will decline first, that Jo- who hardly ever falls ill in the first place and who seems about as conquerable as a mountain to his eyes- will be there to the very end, outliving all the rest of them. And though the thought of causing her yet more pain is almost enough to break his heart, it almost brings him a strange, weary sort of comfort to know that he will go first, that he will not have to see his Jo sicken and fade and fall to dust in his very hand.

But that isn't how it happens.

The end begins with almost imperceptible signals, with a shortness of her breath, with a burning of her lungs, with the very briefest tremors in her usually stolid, welcoming hand. One day she is Jo, his Jo, firm and warm and happy and healthy and as sturdy as his memory of the way her lips had felt when she had first kissed him back. And it feels almost in another, she is another Jo entirely, one whose body seeks to betray her, one who spills her tea as they take it together and who gasps when they go picnic and she cannot make it up a hill without assistance and who tries to sob noiselessly in the early hours in the morning from the pain burning in her hands.

It's just like Jo, of course, to insist that she's fine when they both know better, and refuse to see the doctor before he all but physically makes her go. It takes him hiding all the sugar in the house and serving up several bitter tea-times in a row before Jo will allow a medico to visit her without serving up a row that sends them scurrying away like a roach faced with very bright lights indeed and an army of cats.

"I don't know why you're even being so stubborn about this," he snaps at her as his patience frays and she holds out on a visit for days and days. "I'm sure all he'll do is prescribe an ointment or a visit to the hot-springs or such, Josephine! And aren't you ashamed of living up to all those stereotypes of being a crotchety old woman who can't take care of herself properly? All we'd need to do now is get ahold of a few dozen cats and you'd fit them perfectly!"

"Their company would probably be preferable to your own once you get a bee in your bonnet about something," Jo mutters ungraciously. And then, she sighs as she sees the unrelenting look on his face and says, with very ill grace, "Fine. And please unclench enough to give me a few teaspoons of sugar in my tea, thank you kindly!"

So she lets the doctor come, and Laurie does not quite know what to make of the quiet, still look on her face as they wait for him to arrive, as though she's waiting to hear word of the end of someone she's loved from a distance. It hardly gets any better once the doctor enters their home and then their bedroom while he is cast out to wait, knowing that he shouldn't feel so nervous but somehow unable to help it.

It's an unbearable feeling, to be honest, and Laurie has already begun to plot his merry revenge against his wife when the doctor steps out and Jo, ignoring protests about propriety as always, follows and her eyes stop him.

He's seen her with eyes like that five times before, but never directed at him.

"Teddy," she begins, and her voice is such that the pompous man behind her cannot interrupt its soft cadence.

"Teddy," she tries, and his eyes are already blurring, and he cannot fully understand her just then.

"Teddy..." she attempts once more, haltingly, and he wants to tell her not to speak, to go back through those doors and enter again healthy, to pretend that whatever she had been told were lies hissed through another man's teeth.

He wants to tell her: _I can't stand this, I can't lose you_, but he can't seem to catch his breath.

"Teddy," she finally says, quietly and completely, and her mouth trembles with every word she says. "Teddy, I'm sorry but... the doctor thinks I don't have too much time left."

And the two of them, Jo and her doctor, they end up being very right about that.

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**Author's Note**: Oh, please don't kill me! I wish I didn't have to do this to Jo but... I can't exactly kill off my viewpoint POV, can I? And since Jo and Laurie aren't exactly immortals...

In any case, reviews much appreciated and the next chapter will be up within the next two weeks!


	18. Fireflies

The third-to-last chapter and holy hell was this difficult to write. Still, I do hope it's been worth the wait. I can't believe I began this story about a year ago and it's finally coming to an end...!

Lots of love to Elizabeth for midwifing this entire series through. 3

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**18.**

Jo spends a summer, an autumn, and a winter dying in the end.

It's just like her to be stubborn, really- to hold on so tenaciously to little effect. Any other person, the doctors assure him, would likely have faded over the course of a single season but it's simply so Jo, stubborn and intractable, to hold on to the bitter end. Her heart labors, her body trembles, and her lungs become so precarious that its a wonder that her increasingly frail body does not collapse with her every breath.

And yet, dying she may be, but she is still Jo, and she's never given up on anything, even on herself. The one time that James broaches the subject, having left his practice in New England to come back home to care for his mother, is memorable indeed and serves as the only time it ever enters their conversation.

"It might be easier if you simply-" his son one day haltingly begins to the both of them, before coloring soft scarlet again. "I mean, it wouldn't even be a sin necessarily if... if you were simply take a few sips of... of something to help you and then... then just let yourself..."

They stare at him without understanding for a minute, and their James blushes as pink as the geraniums he would insist on handing his mother as Valentines so many years past.

"It would be easier for you, possibly," he finally murmurs. "If you just let yourself take a... a strong dose of opium and then simply waited for your... rest."

And his son isn't lying, Laurie knows, even as he spoons the last of Jo's soup past her trembling lips. His son would never lie, not about this, and if Laurie were selfless still, he should say something and let her know that he wouldn't begrudge her this painless, cloudless exit.

He should say something. He should let her go. He should give her dignity to the end.

His throat burns. He has to close his eyes. And he knows without looking Jo knows his mind.

"I put you in this world, young man," she murmurs, and even now there's something gentle about her tired words. "Don't think if you start talking nonsense to me, I can't take you right out of it again."

"I never forget, mum," James murmurs in return. "You terrify me much too much for that. " And she looks at them and laughs at the identical looks of amused consternation that both of her men now wear.

"Put it out of your mind," she says grandly, as though it costs her nothing. "God put me on this green earth and when it's time, he'll recall me upward again."

Later, Laurie asks her: "Why wouldn't you say yes, Jo? It would have been the kindest way possible and no one could have blamed you. Not when you've already- already endured so much already."

She closes hers and raises her face up to his. She's tired and in pain but still his Jo, still the most brilliant thing all the world to him.

"Because I love you too much to ever willingly leave you, you overgrown cuckoo," she whispers, and then wraps her frail arms around him as he presses his wet eyes to her hair.

So she fights for her life, stubborn to the last, willing the seasons to change as she endures, pale and tired but persistent. She fights even as all their children come to gather, holding presents and grandchildren and graceless words that try to pretend that she isn't soon to leave all of them. She fights so hard there are times when Laurie can come to think that perhaps the doctors _were_ all wrong, that perhaps Jo _will_ be all right, perhaps even James missed all the important signs and thought wrongly that she was fading when she was far too strong to give in to death.

She had told him once, almost four decades ago, that she wanted to be an actress. She puts on the performance of a lifetime now and when Laurie gives in to hope, it is sometimes enough to fool even his senses.

There are days when it's almost easy, even if she becomes so pale he half-thinks he can see through her translucent flesh. There are days when she can smile and carry on and delight the grandbabies with her impressions and even laugh with him whenever Lizzy goes on about the injustice of depriving women of the vote or Anne sputters on about parleying with the Indian natives. There are days when James can carry her out to their garden and they can watch their children's children play among each other and marvel at the way the innocence of the youngest is taken for granted.

"They're barbarians!" Jo marvels, watching as a Theodore even tinier than his bent old self captures a flag from his cousins and roars out victory before being tackled by all of his equally small cousins. "Absolutely mad, like tiny little dictators gone drunk with power! Good lord, Teddy- surely we were never that bad?"

And he gazes over at her and smiles and thinks of burned dresses and dashing private dances and ghost-written love letters and mad scrambles abroad and billiard lessons that near killed him and says: "Of course not, Josie. We were positively angels in our younger years."

"I know," she agrees complacently. "Shame how little children know these days. Tell James to get a few foils down for a demonstration between the two of you, will you, dear? Let's show them how to _really_ work out aggression."

Given that half of their grand-children seem to have inherited Jo's sense (or lack thereof) of hand-eye coordination, it probably isn't the best encouragement they could receive. And given that James is nearly thirty years younger and far more spry, being defeated so handily in front of his own descendants doesn't do Laurie's ego much good either.

But it'd be worth enduring any amount of discomfort to see his Jo laugh again.

That night, he takes her in his arms and tells her, "You know, half of them probably will be sporting eye patches by next Christmas, thanks to you! And once Lizzy and Anne hear of this, you shall _really_ hear of it endlessly."

"Then it's a good thing that I'll be where they can't reach by then," Jo returns serenely. "If I absolutely _have_ to die, I might as well take advantage of ig."

And he would answer except that when she holds him to her once more, he can feel the death rattle surfacing within her body and radiating from the mound of her breast.

There are good days and then there are bad days, days that go by as painlessly as before and days that creep past them with bitter painfulness. And sometimes it seems that for every day when she is his Jo again, warm and happy and seemingly near content in mind and body, there are two or three or four days when she is betrayed by whatever poison grows within her increasingly thin frame quickly. And as time goes by, more days become the days where she cannot rise, the nights when she cannot sleep, the evenings when she gags on her food and cries in her bed and sobs for a measure of relief.

They have to drug her, all too often, to provide her with that measure eventually. And Laurie looks and looks and looks at her during those nights and knows that he is a monster for wanting her to stay still with him, that if he were better he would let their son give her what he wishes, and let her find her way into heaven painlessly.

It's enough to think it would be right to allow Jo her painless exit after all- damn whatever any clerics might have said previously.

Yet on the night when he comes to give Jo a gentle eternity, she does what he thought would be the impossible. She refuses entirely.

And when she looks at him, her eyes waver in the light but hold no trace of poison in her system- merely conviction, and tenderness, and fear.

She looks at him and her eyes are gentle as she says: "Don't make me go. Don't give me more. I don't want to leave this world yet, Teddy."

And that's when he realizes that she's just as afraid of going as he is of her leaving.

If he had no idea what to do without her after so long, why should she think differently?

He should have known that Jo would never leave him before she absolutely had to; he is the same way, underneath.

"No," he says, and lets the poppy milk fall out of hands, making a mess on the floor as he presses his face to Jo's soft hair and holds her to him fiercely. "No- no, not if you don't want to Jo. No... no... I don't want you to go either. Please don't leave without me."

Her kiss on his trembling brow answers him wordlessly.

And as faithful as ever, however much her body falters, she keeps her word effortlessly. Their last summer together goes by with the tender luminescence of the fireflies the grand-children collect in jars to give to them miniature galaxies. At night, with nothing else left on to guide their weary sight, he and Jo speak of long lost times, mutual memories held between their tender, trembling hands and interlocking bodies. They hold each other as though every passing second could end them completely, and every word they speak stirs each other's gray hair softly.

"Do you regret anything?" he asks her by the glow of the fireflies, the both of them bare beneath their thin covers, damp with the summer heat. "Anything, anything at all that you've left undone? Any work you still have left? Any secrets you want to start spilling?"

She presses her thin hand to the beat of his heart and announces, sadly: " I hate to admit it after all this time but all the children actually belong to the milkman, dear Teddy."

He gasps, she laughs, and then he grins and says, "Seriously, Jo. Come on now. It's long been time for complete honesty."

"Right then," she says, more pensively. "Then I'll confess that the first two are the milkman's but Annie belongs to that dashing, red-headed publisher of my adventure stories- what's his name. He was a demon in bed and I couldn't resist. Terribly shameful of me."

Now it's his time to laugh, although he also taps her gently on the head until his treacherous wife also starts giggling. And it's only when they've settled down and he's finished tickling her for her astonishing perfidy that he touches her cheek again- as bright as it had been when they had first met- and asks his question.

"So there's nothing you'd like to finish before... before it's time to go, Jo? Nothing at all you feel you've left undone on earth?"

She's silent for a long time before she answers, and there's no laughter left in her voice when she speaks.

"Don't you think our life together has been rich already, Teddy? You've always been more than enough for me."

He sighs and runs his fingers through her hair, still her greatest beauty after all these years. "I don't know why you think that. I wouldn't, if I were in your place. I don't think I've always been the husband you deserved. I was often so... so resentful and... immature and silly..."

"And inexplicable," she agrees, carrying on although her hands are gentle as they stroke his thinning curls once more. "And strange, and moody, and Byronic, and too sly by half for me."

"Thank you for all those adjectives," he concludes wryly. And then, leaning forward against her mouth, he whispers: "And what can I do to make up for so often a handful through all these years?"

"You don't need to make up for anything," she returns indignantly, looking tempted to hit him for the sake of his own honor. "I don't regret loving you- I've _never_ regretted loving you!- and I'm not in the least tempted to have you make up for sins that are imaginary. And if you don't apologize to... well... yourself right this instant, I may be tempted to challenge you to a duel!"

"..." Laurie starts to say, only to pause when he realizes that he's actually been struck dumb by his wife's strangeness. "...?"

"I'll take that as capitulation," Jo answers pithily. And then, while he fumbles still for words, she goes on. "And what about our writing, Teddy? What about Lou and her Dorie?"

"What about them?" Laurie manages, honestly confused when he can finally speak. "I suppose they're married now and still profitable as they can be and bringing joy to children the world over and..."

And then he sees that creative spark he had always loved so much alight in Jo's gray eyes and realizes that she's found yet another reason to hold on to living.

"We've had a lot of adventures over the years," Jo reminds him, as though he were in any danger of forgetting. "And I've never enjoyed love stories where everything interesting about a pair dies after marriage, did you?"

"Absolutely not," he agrees, and reaches out to touch her face, the face that he has loved since she spun into his arms dancing. "And it would be a shame to deprive lovers of literature the world over of some of their future misdeeds. For example, who could forget that time you almost eviscerated me with a carving knife that one Thanksgiving when you decided to take on a whole turk-"

He likely would have finished except for the fact that she stops him with both her hands clamped tight on his lips and a frown that promised dire vengeance eventually. And then, after she withdraws and he finishes laughing, she sighs and says: "If I don't finish this last book before I die, are you're going to scandalize my memory by putting my worst misdeeds in?"

"Oh yes," Laurie promises. "You've given me enough material after all, Jo. _More_ than enough, after almost forty years."

"Then I better start writing now to finish it up while I'm still around!" she returns, and beneath her reflexive growl, he can hear her hope building.

Fall comes gently that year and most of their children and grandchildren disembark their homes, although they promise they will come for the holidays in a matter of weeks. Only James stays, bachelor enough not to fret over a family and wealthy enough to forgo making a living for a few months yet from his medical trade. Son though he may be, he fusses enough to make up for the loss of their Lizzy and Annie, and a season goes by slowly in between their spurts of writing and make-believe and attempting to fend James off when he starts fretting over the both of them needlessly.

Still, when all else fails, they can usually keep him busy by tossing paper and pencils at him and forcing him to transcribe their dictations. Although for whatever reason, he point-blank refuses to write down some of the more interesting escapades of little "Jimmy's" younger years.

"But the incident with the turkey baster was _priceless,_," Jo protests at one of his refusals. "And anyway, you were right as rain after we managed to dislodge it from your body."

James' lips thin and he shakes his head. "No, mum. Absolutely not. I shan't let that get published in a thousand years!"

"Fine though," Laurie interrupts. "That's fair enough." And then, once James relaxes enough to spring the trap... "I bet Annie would _love_ to take over for you when she comes back to us. She might even have some stories about the younger years that we were never privy to previously."

James turns three different shades of scarlet before he assents and Jo sends Laurie a wink over his son's sturdy shoulder that he returns until their poor child starts wondering if his elderly parents have contracted some mad Indian disease from Anne that have made their eyelids start twitching wildly.

Thanksgiving comes and usually it's a time of great peril, given how uneven Jo is a housekeeper even after a lifetime together. But for this one, their children are all back home and their Lizzy commandeers the cooking and all Laurie has to worry about is Jo exploding and leaving pieces of herself raining down on them all over if their son-in-law, Anne's missionary Gilbert, comes over at her one more time to preach (he felt rather unnecessarily) the good word once more.

"It's not even as though I've ever been all that large on sinning," Jo moans from her bed, where she's spent almost all the past few days since fall started shading into the snowy weeks. "I've lead a pretty spotless life, discounting the spots of poor writing, and I don't know why that man insists on forever preaching at me. All I want to do is spend one last holiday peaceably enjoying the turkey!"

Laurie looks up from where he's correcting their quarter of a manuscript and frowns. "Jo, you've been eating soup for the last two months. You can't even enjoy a solid meal."

"Well," she adamantly says, "then I wanted to see others have that enjoyment and I think he's ruining it with his tedious sermonizing."

He has to laugh, resisting the urge to lean over the bed and kiss her back into something approaching a good temper. "Didn't you used to be daughter of a chaplain, Madame Josephine?"

"I still am, than you kindly!" Jo returns rather indignantly. And then, shamefaced, she admits: "Although I probably wasn't as good as I should have been even when my father was there. After all, even in church, I mostly liked the parts of the bible that featured lots and lots of... well, you know. You used to read it to me on our honeymoon to get me used to... well, _you know,_ you rascal. Stop grinning so fiendishly at me!"

Then, once he stopped laughing, she ventures: "Do you suppose my dear missionary son-in-law will read the Song of Solomon out loud at our next family gathering if I tell him that it's my favorite part of the Good Book?"

"You can try," Laurie tells her, still grinning. "And if he doesn't outright collapse at what his sweet old sixty-four year old mother-in-law suggested, he might even comply."

And the evening when she did just as she said would go into the annals of the Laurence family's scandalous history.

"We've got to remember that one to shovel into the last volume later," Jo chortles later and, not sure if his heart now breaks or soars, Laurie gently agrees.

Christmas that year commences with a half-finished manuscript and with all their little birds once again back to their home. Between the presents, the children, and the never ending antics that come from their descendants being merry, it's almost difficult to believe that this will be their last Christmas together, no matter what Jo's soft sobs in the night or James' tired, tired eyes say to the contrary.

When he looks at her, it's as though he can see sand draining through an hour-glass, depleting steadily. She weakens even more day by day, until she can barely bring her head away from her pillow without help, and has to be carried from their bedroom down to the living room to see the presents being opened savagely. But she smiles nonetheless and the light in her eyes when she sees the tiny Teddy and Joanna and Edmund and Lucy play with their (thankfully blunt) new fencing foils is worth everything.

Later in bed, as the snow falls beyond them, she turns to him and asks, "Was that your idea, Teddy?"

He hems and haws about the answer for a minute, occupying himself with rearranging her thick coverlets about her and pressing kisses to her soft hair. And even when he answers, he's deliberately airy, though he's sue the wry smile on her face means he hasn't come close to fooling her hair.

"What would you do if I said yes?"

"I would thank you," she replies promptly, still smiling. "And then I would ask you how on earth you managed to get it past Lizzy and Annie, who look rather put out over the impending mayhem that their brood will be up to."

"You're welcome," he says genially, and slips under the covers into Jo's arms- frailer than ever but somehow as strong as ever, and as warm, and as firm, and as real. "And I don't worry for myself in the middle of that mayhem in the least. Jo, I blamed the entire idea on you!"

She laughed softly at that, her arms trembling softly around him, until he pulled away and pressed her shoulder against his aged, ardent heart, until they curled in bed in the same way they had when they were young and they had all the world shining before them, filled with endless possibilities.

"Are you happy, Jo?" he finally asks when he can, holding the memory of all those days that had come to him as though they were once again both twenty-four years old. "Do you want for anything for right now? Is there anything else I can do?"

"No," she replies, and her voice is gentle and soft, as though she were thinking on as much too. "I'm grateful for the most wondrous husband in the world, and the best children and grand-children possible, and the fact that I didn't ruin all of Christmas by popping off right before it ensued. Lord, can you imagine what the children would have thought? Merry Christmas, darling children, and oh! Here's a dead grandmother. Try and stuff _that_ into a stocking, why don't you!"

He laughs almost before he knows it, and tears spring to his eyes at the thought, tears that are incredulous but tender and nearly grateful too. And when he speaks again, reforms his words with care, as though they are ever shifting.

"Is it time, then? Are you sure?"

And even as he presses his face to her hair, he knows she's smiling sadly.

"Yes, Teddy. For myself, if not for you."

Of course- (he realizes then)- of course she had known what he has been planning. He's been hers for forty years, after all... how could he have expected that she would not realize he would be storing up all of James' precious medicine, bit by bit, not merely for her but for him as well? How could she not know his mind well enough to know that he would not want her leaving this world without him by her side, holding on the only way he knew how to?

It's all he can do to raise his eyes to meet her blazing ones right now, to see in his own reflection her truth.

He supposed he had been a fool to believe he could dupe her still after all these years together.

And yet- what a hopeful fool!

"I want to," he says, and he feels as ardent and in love as he had during that first disastrous proposal, and as maddened by her as well. "I want to- I want to go _with_ you- and don't lie to me and tell me some part of you doesn't want this too! I have lived with you and I have loved you for all the years of my life and I don't ever want to go about living it without you. I'm an old man and I have nothing left but you and not even the children need me anymore. Nobody truly needs me but you. And whether we depart for hell or heaven together- I don't care. Jo, I just want to be with _you._"

Tears fill her eyes- honest ones this time, not merely ones that come from pain or displeasure. He's never wanted to see her cry again for him but... but he's said nothing false so far.

It's all been completely true.

"We're not," she begins weakly, when she finally can, "we're not myths, Teddy. We're not and we can't be. We're not Philemon and Baucis and I can't simply wrap you into my trunk when I depart for another place entirely. I love you and it hurts to think of being somewhere without you! But... but you've so many years left in you and I don't want you to just throw them away because... because I'm about to die and you think I... I..."

_Because you think I'm afraid to die by myself._

_Even if you are right about such a thing._

And that was a part of it but not all of it, though he did not want her to be alone when she left, alone and frightened, as she'd always been when it came to things that changed beyond her means.

But he was afraid of being left behind, so perhaps that made him a coward too.

A fool, and a coward, and hopeless old man who did not want to be left behind completely.

"What would you have done?" he finally asks. "If I were you? Would you have simply let me go without saying anything?""

She looks at him, great gray eyes wide in her forever beloved face, and he explains further.

"If I were in that bed, and I were the one leaving? Jo, what would you be do?"

Her eyelashes flutter over her drawn cheeks and he goes on, both loving and tender, ruthless and sincere.

"You wouldn't think any differently, Jo. After so many years together, I know you."

She sighs and presses her wet face to his neck and he repeats, gently, "I know you. I love you. I don't want you to leave without any company."

It takes her time to resurface, time that Laurie thinks of what the children will find tomorrow- their bodies wrapped together on the bed tomorrow, living no longer but still entwined, still together, still loving, still loyal, still in some way forever persisting. But then Jo lifts up fervid eyes that no illness in the world could ever decline and says: "I know you know that I want you with me, selfish though it may be. But... but we're not shirkers either, Teddy. And you've got work left to do."

He stares back, unprepared entirely, and she manages a tremulous smile or two. "I can't take you with me on the carriage beyond this world, Teddy. After all, we still have our manuscript that's barely half finished. It's the story of our life and I'll be damned if we leave it without one of us to finish something that needs at least another year."

Pained, he tries to reply. "Oh Jo... please... I..."

"It's not a binding request," she tells him, her voice solemn but her eyes sparkling once more as she wove together a reason for him to keep living. "Teddy, I wouldn't do that to you. I just... I just want to give you a reason to keep on going. Because we _will_ be together again once your end comes, I promise you. If I have to tear down the gates of heaven to make it so, I'll do it happily! Even if I have to do it without you. But until then... until then..."

Only Jo would have made this request of him. Only Jo would be like a Scheherazade in reverse, telling him to tell their story to keep him alive and well, binding him with art and love and history.

"Even if you ask me to do this," he says finally, "I don't know if I can. I've lived every day since we've met in the hope of being with you- ever since I knew that you were the only one who could give me a second family. If I have lived in this world for these last few years, Jo..."

There are tears in his old eyes, enough to blind him, tears both old and new. And this is Jo, his Jo, his wife of forty years, the woman he has loved for so long he can barely remember what a man without her could do. This was Jo, brilliant, sweet, warm, and lovely- and Jo, temperamental, thorny, starchy and stern- Jo who could both elevate him and madden him near insensibly-

Jo, his bride, his wife, the love of his life. Jo, who had always stood on her own two feet and helped him learn how to stand too.

"If I have ever fully lived in this world," he says, "it was only because of you."

"Then try to live for me and our work at least a little while longer," she whispers, and the hands that cup his face now are the hands that have woven across his back a hundred-thousand times before and raised his children and taught him how to be firm and true. "Live for me because it's our story and it needs to be told anew. Live for me because you love me and for as long as I've lived..."

He can barely see her as the candles flicker out in the chill winter night, but he knows her profile anyhow, knows its weight and its angles and its measure. He knows it as well as he knows her face and her hair and her smile and her eyes, and the way she's determined to fight one last time for his life, to make sure he lived the last few moments of his life with absolute sincerity.

"As long as I've lived," she finally whispers, "I've also lived for you."

He knows as he looks at her that this will one of her last smiles, one of her last words, one of her last hopes, one of her last desires. He knows this to be true. He knows this as well as he knows how much he could never deny her anything that she truly wanted- just as the reverse was also true.

"Promise me you'll do your best to give our story to the world," she says, and her lips tremble as their tears fall and mingle together. "Promise me and I'll promise you that no matter what happens afterward, I _will_ be waiting for you."

And when he reaches over to embrace her one last time, their gentle kiss in the coming darkness is all the answer they need for another shared lifetime or two.

* * *

**Author's Note: **Reviews are **really appreciated. **I am having a _really _hard time writing the next chapter because I feel so terrible for Laurie... and without encouragement, I'm afraid this series might become a dead fic. There are a lot of people who follow this series and never review... so if you're one of them, please be kind and let me know if you're still reading! 3


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